Just thought I’d follow up on the last post with an experiment which maxed out on those heart-healthy poly’s and reduced the saturated fat / cholesterol right down. Like many other trials that didn’t give the “right” answer, it was no doubt brushed under the research carpet. Basically, a set of businessmen in Helsinki with risk factors for heart disease were randomised into two groups of approx. 600 each: the control group went ahead as normal, while the intervention group had 5 years of hypotensive and hypolipidemic drug treatment combined with diet intervention, and after this continued with the diet intervention alone. The latter included energy restriction, reduction of saturated fat, cholesterol, alcohol/sugar, while they increased their intake of polyunsaturates (mainly margarine – mmmnn), fish, chicken and veal – they also had smoking cessation help and some other lifestyle element support.
So what happened? Similar to some other unpopular trials, not what was expected:
Now, the usual riposte to this is “maybe they had trans-fats increased also”. Maybe. But I’d be more inclined to infer that an active lowering of healthy animal fat, combined with an excess of w6, is deleterious to health. Remember that the ubiquitous trials to lower natural saturated fat could never generate a decent outcome; but several trials seem to generate an impressive negative result by reducing the natural saturated fat and spiking with the alternative – including the modern industrially extracted w6 seed oils. But these don’t get widely communicated – they don’t support the dogma; a reasonably well-known (or is it?) example of the latter is the Sydney Diet Heart Study, resurrected in 2013 after they recovered the original data and reassessed it, in doing so realising that the original publication didn’t refer to the key findings at all(!) This 2013 publication was excused away by the likes of the Australian Heart Foundation, with the typical trans-fat backhander, but the expert authors think otherwise; I’m inclined to agree with the latter. Below is a link a high level analysis of the 2013 publication, followed by a link to the publication itself. Anyway, food for thought – and a damn good reason to eliminate vegetable oil from your diet…….replacing it with ancestral, evolutionary appropriate, saturated and monounsaturated (and indeed whole-food contained polyunsaturated fats). In closing, never forget that the fats must be taken with moderate/minimal carbohydrate, otherwise the bets are off…….!
http://syontix.com/revisiting-the-sydney-diet-heart-study/
https://dspace-prod-lib.cc.uic.edu/bitstream/handle/10027/10968/bmj%20(1).e8707.pdf?sequence=2
