"Unsaturated Fats Linked To Longer Healthier Life" - Harvard Gazette

tonto

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I haven't read the JAMA article referenced, but wondering what people think of this...

Unsaturated fats linked to longer, healthier life

Consuming greater amounts of unsaturated fats is associated with lower mortality, according to a study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a large study population followed for more than three decades, researchers found that greater consumption of saturated and trans fats was linked with higher mortality rates than consuming the same number of calories from carbohydrates. Most importantly, replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats conferred substantial health benefits. This study provides further support for the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americansthat emphasize the types of fat rather than total amount of fat in the diet.

The study is the most detailed and powerful examination to date of how dietary fats impact health. It suggests that replacing saturated fats like butter, lard, and fat from red meat with unsaturated fats from plants — such as olive, canola, and soybean oils — can confer substantial health benefits and should continue to be a key message in dietary recommendations.

The study will be published online today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“There has been widespread confusion in the biomedical community and the general public in the last couple of years about the health effects of specific types of fat in the diet,” said Dong Wang, S.D. ’16, a research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School and the study’s lead author. “This study documents important benefits of unsaturated fats, especially when they replace saturated and trans fats.”

The study included 126,233 participants from two large, long-term studies — the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study — who answered survey questions every two to four years about their diet, lifestyle, and health for up to 32 years. During the follow-up, 33,304 deaths were documented. Researchers from Harvard Chan School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital examined the relationship between the types of fats in the participants’ diets and overall deaths among the group during the study period, as well as deaths due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and respiratory disease.

Different types of dietary fat had different associations with mortality, the researchers found. Trans fats — on their way to being largely phased out of food — had the most significant adverse impact on health. Every 2 percent higher intake of trans fat was associated with a 16 percent higher chance of premature death during the study period. Greater consumption of saturated fats was also linked with greater mortality risk. When compared with the same number of calories from carbohydrates, every 5 percent increase in saturated fat intake was associated with an 8 percent higher risk of overall mortality.

Conversely, intake of high amounts of unsaturated fats, both polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, was associated with between 11 percent and 19 percent lower overall mortality compared with intake of the same number of calories from carbohydrates. Among the polyunsaturated fats, both omega-6, found in most plant oils, and omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and soy and canola oils, were associated with lower risk of premature death.

The types of fat that replaced other types of fat had specific health effects, the researchers found. For example, people who replaced saturated fats with unsaturated fats, especially polyunsaturated fats, had significantly lower risk of death overall during the study period, as well as lower risk of death from CVD, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and respiratory disease, compared with those who maintained high intakes of saturated fats. The findings for cardiovascular disease are consistent with many earlier studies showing reduced total and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol when unsaturated fats replace trans or saturated fats.

People who replaced saturated fats with carbohydrates had only a slightly lower mortality risk. In addition, replacing total fat with carbohydrates was associated with modestly higher mortality. This was not surprising, the authors said, because carbohydrates in the American diet tend to be primarily refined starch and sugar, which have a similar influence on mortality risk as saturated fats.

“Our study shows the importance of eliminating trans fat and replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, including both omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. In practice, this can be achieved by replacing animal fats with a variety of liquid vegetable oils,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.​
 

snowboard111

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Seriously? :bag:

The idea of how unstable/dangerous unsaturated fats have nothing to do with Ray Peat... it's how biochemistry work. Anybody or anything that ignore that is just missing the point. Until
a person do their own homework as to how the nature of all the different fats work within the organism, every so-called "study" will seem to be right.
 
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Blossom

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While I'm not scientifically savvy enough to refute this myself fortunately Haidut has already done an excellent job of that here,

A must-read PUFA primer (The Haidut Edition)

who answered survey questions every two to four years about their diet, lifestyle,
Dietary self reports are highly suspect imo. Publishing something of this nature in JAMA gives it air of legitimacy and authority so for many that is all it takes to be convinced. I see it as nothing more than propaganda to maintain the status quo.
 

Mufasa

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Seriously? :bag:

The idea of how unstable/dangerous unsaturated fats have nothing to do with Ray Peat... it's how biochemistry work. Anybody or anything that ignore that is just missing the point. Until
a person do their own homework as to how the nature of all the different fats work within the organism, every so-called "study" will seem to be right.

If we begin to make the theory more important than the experiment that falsifies it, then this will just become a religious creepy sect.

That saying, I doubt that PUFAs are good in general, and Im quite sure it is not doing my body any good, but please, lets not ignore science, just because it doesnt fit in the model that ray peat has provided.
 

schultz

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I'm not big on these very broad epidemiological food questionnaire studies. I feel like they can't control for everything. I'm not very good at criticizing studies, but I'll throw a few ideas around...

They use words like "mortality risk" which makes me think they are checking things like cholesterol levels and if the person has higher cholesterol they are saying that person is at a higher risk of dying. The fact that PUFA lowers cholesterol is well established.

This leads to a second point. Considering this data is based on the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Study, and therefore the people the data is based on are health professionals, these same people are likely to take medications when their lab numbers give them cause. For example, if total cholesterol comes back at 210, which is considered a treatable number, then a health professional is likely to take statins. Since it's likely that people who eat a lot of PUFA have lower cholesterol, then it may be that the people eating more saturated fat are also the ones taking medications.

One small thing that constantly irritates me is that they consider lard and therefore bacon and pork products to be a saturated fat/monounsaturated fat. It's crazy how much I see this in papers. I just saw one yesterday and actually wrote it down because it made me laugh. Here is the quote from the study...

"Soybean oil is high in PUFAs whereas most experimental animal studies employ diets high in saturated fats, typically lard."

Obviously it depends what the pigs were fed, which makes lard an awful fat for accurate experiments. Modern lard is upwards of 30% PUFA, the same as canola oil! Why not use tallow, butter, coconut oil or palm kernel oil?!


Anyway, I'm not very qualified to give good criticisms, but thought I would share a few ideas just to get the conversation going.
 

Agent207

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If we begin to make the theory more important than the experiment that falsifies it, then this will just become a religious creepy sect.

Im afraid at the end that's inevitable. Very most of us are simplistic binary thinking beings. It gets complicated analyzing things out of the good/bad labelling.

Science tends to be corrupted by money, I would say rather "let's not ignore THE FACTS"
 

Pointless

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Well these dietary recommendations are based on epidemiological studies and surveys. It's extremely suspect. I wouldn't call this a scientific gold standard. But you'd have to have a coherent view of the organism to draw any real conclusions. Thanks blossom for the phrase, I find a lot of use for it. The problem is that saturated fat intake is linked, in the study population, with inflammatory diets instead of coconut oil.
 

Luna

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correlation does not equal causation
Saturated fatty acids do not cause longer life span.
Monounsaturated fatty acids do not cause longer life span.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids do not cause longer life span.

Fatty acids content correlates with life span.
Water content correlates with life span.
Cholesterol content correlates with life span.
Then fatty acids may or may not be the primary variable to affect life span.
There may also be an interaction of fatty acids with other molecules, hence, a one to one conclusion of X causes Schema_A is not a valid answer, rather X + Y + Z + ... + n causes Schema_A.

i.e. red correlates with orange
red correlates with brown
orange is good (like orange juice)
brown is good (like chocolate)
therefore red is good.
red correlates with purple
hence purple is good because red is good.
blue correlates with purple
because purple is good
blue is also good.
But blue is bad, blue lights are bad. (except for methylene blue)
red lights are good.
brown has blue,
then brown is therefore not good.
brown is bad.
oh and also purple is bad.

Picking one variable, and saying it correlates (co occurs with frequency) to a schema does not mean causation.
 

snowboard111

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What model? I'm pretty sure Ray hasn't invented himself lipid peroxidation... like I said; it's how biochemistry work.

It's science that is ignoring science. Not me (or people who can wrap their around this) ignoring science because of Ray Peat
 
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schultz

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Only controlled metabolic ward clinical human studies are of value.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic :shock:

I was reading a study yesterday and they said this in the discussion section at the end...

"There is currently considerable debate in both the scientific literature as well as the lay press as to which components of the American diet are the most obesogenic. Since diet studies in humans involve a large number of variables, most of which cannot be properly controlled, in this study we used mice and precisely defined isocaloric diets..."

The study found that soybean oil was very obesogenic and diabetogenic... lol. They were comparing it to coconut oil.
 

What-a-Riot

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The saturated fat eaters are likely eating fast food and hot dogs and ash-mound grill burgers. Unsaturated fat sources are often also good magnesium sources and the only place most people get vitamin e. That coupled with the fact that the longstanding association between unsaturated fats and health means the people eating more of them are probably living healthier lives in other ways too, likely exercising and burning pufa as it comes in while vitamin c recycles the vitamin e it came with and allows them to retain it. And just legitimately wanting to be healthy goes a long way too, in my opinion. This article is hardly science by the scientific method, and I'm no scientist, but this is just lazy and simple-minded. It's logic based on a conclusion rather than a conclusion based on logic.
 
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these studies are massaged with various mathematical tools. They eliminate studies and choose studies arbitrarily. The results are often relative risk that is too small to be important.

Best to use a combination of solid theory and double blind randomized control trials, or decent animal experiments.
 

johnwester130

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You are not the Tin Man from the wizard of oz.

You do not need fish oil, castor oil, flax oil and sunflower oil.
 

lindsay

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You are not the Tin Man from the wizard of oz.

You do not need fish oil, castor oil, flax oil and sunflower oil.

This is great :) I think I need to put this quote on my refrigerator or cupboards as a reminder!

That being said, I would like to say that everyone here has made very good points! Especially Schultz's comment about pig fat - we buy pasture raised pork, and even that is not completely solid at room temperatures. Though much more like tallow than regular pork fat.

The only thing which has kind of perplexed me for a very long time when it comes to fats is whole foods versus non-whole foods. Meaning, is peanut butter really that bad? Does the peanut fibers (which are not digestible) carry out the bad fats and totally keep them from being absorbed? I mention this because every time we feed our dog Peanut Butter, he has the most healthy well formed stools. Cures his constipation every time - and since good bowel movements mean less endotoxin, well..... just saying.

Also, I think there are a whole lot of lifestyle questions that should also be included in these studies - as well as a thorough list of foods actually eaten. In my mind, the biggest offenders would be baked goods - the combination of gluten, PUFA & sugar is pure hazard, IMO. I worked at a bakery one summer when I was in college and ate a lot of whoopie pies - nothing put on the pounds like those whoopie pies, and I was running and on my feet all day, so I was certainly active. Would those same PUFA calories, however, when carried in a salad (which may cause them from even being absorbed) count the same as eating whoopie pies? Is eating fish as bad as eating processed canola oil? And, is good olive oil really all that bad? I mean, it hardens in the refrigerator - just like coconut oil.

One of the things I've noticed is, my friends who eat a lot of fats in their foods, but who usually avoid baked goods and excess sugars are leaner than those who do not. I think the combination of PUFA, starch and sugar together is super toxic - more so than eating a salad drenched in olive oil. Also, if people are eating any of their "saturated" fat foods and cooking them in oil (like McDonald's and most chain restaurants), there's not telling how much PUFA is connected with those saturated fats. I personally tend to think that lifestyle and knowing combinations of listed foods would be more telling than just a bunch of surveyed data. I hate studies like these. But thanks for sharing nonetheless!
 

Luann

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Also, if people are eating any of their "saturated" fat foods and cooking them in oil (like McDonald's and most chain restaurants), there's not telling how much PUFA is connected with those saturated fats. I

Yep, and these studies don't even know PUFA from SFA, i.e. when they call hamburgers a saturated source, like have you looked at the label? Mostly PUFA.
 

What-a-Riot

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Peat says the body preferentially stores PUFA in favor of burning saturated fat, and that may be true, but according to the study in this thread Fatty Acid Mobilization/Oxidation Hierarchy - Bioscience and another abstract I read, PUFA are preferentially mobilized from storage. Since adipocytes are continuously releasing and taking up fatty acids, PUFA will be taking their most insidious role in the context of a chronically hyper caloric diet in which they can't be properly regulated. That's what I was saying above about health conscious people who eat polyunsaturated whole foods with magnesium and vitamin e plus other natural antioxidants, who also maintain a healthy vitamin c status. They are more likely to have a positive vitamin e and electrolyte balance than your typical healthy-enough person, but that doesn't make those PUFA rich foods optimal. It just means it's possible to eat them and live a longer and healthier life those who don't.
 

jyb

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“Our study shows the importance of eliminating trans fat and replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, including both omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. In practice, this can be achieved by replacing animal fats with a variety of liquid vegetable oils,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.​

I actually thought the post was a joke, had to click on the link to convince me.
 
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Peat says the body preferentially stores PUFA in favor of burning saturated fat, and that may be true, but according to the study in this thread Fatty Acid Mobilization/Oxidation Hierarchy - Bioscience and another abstract I read, PUFA are preferentially mobilized from storage. Since adipocytes are continuously releasing and taking up fatty acids, PUFA will be taking their most insidious role in the context of a chronically hyper caloric diet in which they can't be properly regulated. That's what I was saying above about health conscious people who eat polyunsaturated whole foods with magnesium and vitamin e plus other natural antioxidants, who also maintain a healthy vitamin c status. They are more likely to have a positive vitamin e and electrolyte balance than your typical healthy-enough person, but that doesn't make those PUFA rich foods optimal. It just means it's possible to eat them and live a longer and healthier life those who don't.
I think this is true.

I always read those stories about people that live to be 100 or hundred and 10, as I'm sure you do too. Many of them eat PUFAs. Maybe not massive amounts, but some.

Thanks for this thread reference, this is helpful.

Full study is here
http://www.jlr.org/content/34/9/1515.full.pdf
 

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