Comment by colingauvin
4 hours ago
I'm not a MAGA or MAHA person. I just hate anecdotal pontificating about science.
First of all, regarding the trans-fat discussion - in general, yes, keep trans fats low. However there are a couple important things to consider. One is that not all trans fats are created equal, and trans fats from animals are generally found to be less dangerous:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/
>. We found no relationship between R-TFA intake levels of up to 4·19 % of daily energy intake (EI) and changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as TC:HDL-C and LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C):HDL-C ratios
(One author is from a dairy group, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Unfortunately this is par for the course with nutritional literature, a huge amount of it is "sponsored").
Another small sidebar is that there is of course the chance that monounsaturated turn into trans fats as well, and presumably those developed by seed oils would be riskier than those found in animal fats. But the data on that are sparse-to-nonexistant.
The other thing that irks me here is the typical dietitian take is to see everything through the lens of food. It makes sense when you deal with cardiovascular patients, but cardiovascular patients are already already pre-selected for genetic risk, that represents up to or even greater than 90% of the signal in CV events. CV events are way more visible than whatever supposed systemic inflammation omega-6s provide, but it doesn't meant that they should be the sole guiding factor in policy. If anything, they are over-represented relative to more chronic effects.
I'm not saying that there's some easy answer, just this whole article was annoyingly hand-wavy about science that we can actually mostly track.
That study is worthless.
1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios.
2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades.
3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end.
4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect.
Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.
If you think this article is annoyingly hand-wavy about science, wait until you see the dietary guidelines put out by this administration!