So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
In this specific case.
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...
I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
Edit: The new guidelines are expected to be released today.
https://www.wfla.com/news/national/kennedy-wants-to-end-war-...
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
Maybe adults, but probably not the people who were taught the food pyramid - children.
Edit: changed the tense to acknowledge this was in the past. Thought that was obvious since the food pyramid was a thing of the past.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
meme, noun. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another -- WordnikI agree with siblings that nothing jumps out (to my non-expert eye) as "very extreme".
EDIT: Removed long-winded snark after a more careful reading of the linked document.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
Who knows, these guidelines might indeed be sensible, but anything labeled “Make America Healthy Again” has no scientific credibility.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
A) Eating a pound/kg of fat
B) Eating a pound/kg of refined sugar
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
Unless your digestive system is hyperactive, a lot of this huge glob of fat will likely just pass right through without being absorbed into your bloodstrean.
The refined sugar is virtually guaranteed to fully hit your bloodstream and right now. It's enough to send some people into a life threatening diabetic coma.
After eating a pound of fat, you may want a nap but dying from it is extremely unlikely.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
I wasn't that lucky and pure oral hygiene standards in eastern Europe didn't help as well. Had half teeth with fillings by age of 20. However, after eliminating sugars, no new cavities in unaffected teeth, just had to replace existing fillings and crown in 10 years.
Hard to tell if it was gradual or not, I had one panel done 3 months later and it showed that all values are within acceptable range now, but very close to thresholds, and ~10 months later all values were just in the middle between min/max where applicable.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
It was very promising in the exclusion phase - cutting gluten and dairy eliminated all the symptoms for 3 months. Per protocol I also excluded other things like nightshades, nuts/seeds, grains. But after 3 months, while adding things back, even in small amounts, one by one, got all the symptoms back, being more severe, and after excluding things again, symptoms are not going away completely. I think that our body is a very complex system, distributed in some sense, with delayed and cascade effects that are really hard to "debug".
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
But I see a significant fraction my friends, family and students in university to have no clue. I recently worked with a student who shared his struggle with extra weight and asked about my gym habits. To his surprise I can't exercise except daily walk and I told that eliminating refined sugars is low hanging fruit. The student was surprised (early 20s) and didn't know how to tell if yogurt in cafeteria had added sugars.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.
I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
The one I like are the sodas that tout "made with real sugar" as if that's better for you than HF syrup.
A well placed warning label makes it a little easier to hear:
I am currently reading The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
Presumably "5 servings of grains a day" assumes no added sugar, otherwise it would say "5 servings of grains and some sugar a day".
Yes, but -
- Unless youre wealthy, it is difficult to get access to good bread. Far too much of the bread normally available has added sugar or similar products.
- Modern science argues even about the non-added sugar portion (the starches) and whether 5 servings of that was even good. Insulin resistance isnt just caused by added sugar, but just excessive starches (of which we were told to have 5 servings!)
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
Kennedy Flips Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/well/rfk-jr-food-pyramid-...
Kennedy said to avoid the sugary, processed foods that he labels as poisonous to health. (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Mr. Kennedy said (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
When Lucky Strike needed more women to smoke cigarettes in the late 1920s, it turned to Bernays.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
Have to be a little careful with this claim. Dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are problematic either way.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
Of course, you can get overweight by eating too much sugar, but it's really about not eating too many calories long-term, regardless of the source.
And of course, refined sugar isn't healthy at all and consumption should be kept to a minimum, outside of exercise.
The fat mechanism I understand, but what is the mechanism for sugar in CVD?
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Every health authority mentions both cholesterol/saturated fat and blood sugar as contributing factors.
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
why? the state does not need you to live past your retirement age. in fact, it's preferable if you don't.
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
… is a pushback of sorts on the sugar industry.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid
Some other discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962750
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32978590
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183
and on and on...
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
By Gary Taubes July 7, 2002
But sugar-sweetened foods contain saturated fat ... so ?
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
no conflict == no interest
I agree about the need for more transparency and more peer review actually being done