In the early 1800s, people believed that organic compounds (chemicals associated with living processes) were fundamentally different to inorganic ones. They thought that such compounds were imbued with a sort of life-force, and that man would never be able to replicate them.
Friedrich Wohler upset everybody by synthesizing urea (by accident). People then realised that although organic compounds have some interesting properties - based as they are on carbon, which is a rather unique element - they're still just chemicals, and you can synthesize them like anything else. There's no magical distinction between, say, urea that you extract from animal urine, or the same molecule made in the lab.
Dieticians, as usual, are about 200 years behind the cutting edge of science. They still believe that some mysterious factor distinguishes the palmitic acid that you ingest (the most common saturated fatty acid in natural foods) and the palmitic acid that your body synthesizes for itself, as an energy storage/transport medium.
The former will apparently give you heart disease if gets into your bloodstream. The latter ... well, it's a bit hard to accept that your body would expend effort on synthesizing something that, as soon as it's released into your bloodstream, causes heart disease; and if it does cause heart disease in the same way as dietary saturated fat, it's even harder to accept that evolution or The Creator would come up with such a boneheaded scheme.
The only remaining conclusion is that the palmitic acid that you ingest, and the palmitic acid that your body makes for itself, are two different things. One is poison. One is harmless. Despite the fact that they're chemically identical and are, indeed, made by the same process (the fat you ingest from, say, a pork chop was created by the same chemical pathway that your body uses ... albeit inside a pig).
Anyway, if you can accomodate that feat of doublethink, it's all downhill from there. Saturated fat in your diet "causes high cholesterol", and that causes heart disease. But since saturated fat that your body makes is harmless, you can eat as many carbohydrates as you like. Your body will convert much of those excess carbs to palmitic acid for storage. But that's OK, because only the palmitic acid that you eat is a problem!
You're probably losing the thread at this point, unsure whether I'm serious or just extracting the urea. Unfortunately, it's both. This is what the medical profession actually believes to be true. And their solution to it is inevitably illogical: just like the medieval leech-merchants who believed we had "too much blood" that needed removing, the modern doctor thinks we have "too much cholesterol" that must be removed. The difference is that leeches, on the whole, were fairly harmless. Statins ... not so much.
I honestly don't know how this sort of thing happens. But I fervently wish that it didn't.
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TheAwfulToad
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Hence people are still suspicious of deadly LDL, which is merely part of the lipid transport system and cannot or will not reseach the difference between a healthy individual with large 'fluffy' LDL and small, dense easly oxidised LDL.
If you think about it there isn't a single animal on the planet in it's natural environment who is obese or who worries about the chemical composition of it's food. Nor is there, or ever has been, a human society whose diet is based entirely on plants, a fact that escapes most vegans supplementing with man made vitamin B12!
>> If you think about it there isn't a single animal on the planet in it's natural environment who is obese or who worries about the chemical composition of it's food
Indeed. But if dieticians told people "just stop worrying and eat proper food", they'd all have to go and join the dole queue
As for the cholesterol business, I'm pretty sure most doctors don't understand it and don't have time to read up on it. Much of what we know about lipid tranport was only figured out in the last 20 years or so, and it's still not fully understood. So any doctor older than, say, 50 will know next-to-nothing about the subject because it would not have been covered in medical school; or, worse, it would have been wrong.
I suspect most doctors just go along with the NICE recommendations and count down the days to retirement.
Our vet actually suggested our cat had to go on a low-protein, high-carb diet because his kidneys were failing. I told him as politely as I possibly could that that sounds like the daftest idea ever.
There is no cure for chronic kidney disease in cats, but our cat has been thriving well for about a year now on my patent formula very-high-fat, moderate-protein diet (ie., roast chicken plus a little oily fish, with all the skin and grease). Apart from a rather high urine volume he's completely asymptomatic. The vet thinks this is a "paradox"
I subscribe to healthinsightuk.org who have some interesting posts. If the link below works it is an interesting article re cholesterol and statins from October 2019. The comments section following it is also interesting including the quote from “Passive Pete” about halfway down.
As a few people here know, I've been working on a book with precisely the premise they describe there. I was considering setting up a blog to promote it. Reckon I'd be wasting my time.
I think I'll contact those guys and see if they're interested in a guest contributor. They appear to be doing a very good job indeed.
Definitely contact them and maybe Dr Kendrick too, there may still be some areas of knowledge where you and he can help each other. Maybe a book by you will hit the mainstream. Someone has to get the message out there.
My friend commented that I had lost weight so I was telling her about LCHF. Her reply was that she couldn't do this type of diet as she has high cholesterol (8) and has been put on statins. Her GP is quite young. Why isn't this information filtering through to the medical profession, even the younger ones? Don't worry, it's a rhetorical question
Ooops, I assumed it was a programme. It's very scary how little is being taught about diet. One of my neighbours is a GP - I will ask him about his knowledge of diet and nutrition. Thanks for sending me the link - very interesting reading
Frankly, I find this sort of thing a bit weak. In my job, new knowledge turns up every 24 hours and I'm expected to keep abreast of at least some of it. If I don't know enough about something, I damn well go away and find out about it.
I suspect the problem here is not so much that doctors don't have the time and inclination to find out about diet, but that so much of what is written is outright nonsense. They'd have to sift through mountains of drivel to get to the factual information, and doctors don't have time for that.
In relation to medics in training, I suspect it's also about the low priority it's given. But I'm sure you're right about the difficulty of sifting through the dross
It just occurred to me that doctors actually have a massive advantage compared to engineers. We're dealing with a moving target, whereas human bodies have been the same since forever! So there's really no excuse for not going away and doing your own research on something you don't know much about ... apart from the fact that doctors are horribly overworked. Perhaps they should all be allowed "study days" once a month to go and learn something new.
Study days, or professional meetings, are likely to be funded by drug companies, or they were in my days in the health service. But free days, yes, that could work, if they were required to report back to peers on how they had spent them
There's also a longitudinal study that just reported back on a Scottish population. They observed that those with the highest cholesterol had almost zero incidence of stroke; those with the lowest had something like 30% incidence. Predictably enough, the response from officialdom was a ball of tumbleweed blowing gently across the plains.
I can't remember where I saw this now. I'll try to root it out when I have a chance.
It's interesting, because one side of my family history has quite good cholesterol levels, never had anyone on statins, and yet nearly everyone over 50 has had a blood clot. Don't know much about diet/exercise levels for them all though.
Yes, there is that. In many ways their hands are tied. If they depart from NICE policy, they're exposed to the possibility of professional censure, or legal proceedings, if anything goes wrong.
Different saturated fatty acids have varying effects on health.
Most studies have investigated the health effects of saturated fat as a whole — without distinguishing between the different types.
The evidence is largely comprised of observational studies that investigate associations. Many of them link a high intake of saturated fat to an increased risk of heart disease, but the evidence is not entirely consistent.
Though certain types of long-chain saturated fat may raise your levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol, no compelling evidence proves any of them cause heart disease. More high-quality research is needed.
Nevertheless, most official health organizations advise people to limit their intake of saturated fat and replace it with unsaturated fat.
While the harmful effects of saturated fat are still a matter of debate, most agree that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat has benefits for heart health.
>> Though certain types of long-chain saturated fat may raise your levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol, no compelling evidence proves any of them cause heart disease.
>> Different saturated fatty acids have varying effects on health.
Although some would say this is just refining the evidence, it looks to me like moving the goalposts.
For years we've been told that it's "saturated fat" per se that's the problem, because of it's effect on LDL. This completely ignores that fact that bodies aren't much interested in whether a fat is saturated or not, but (as you said) has slightly different reaction pathways for different chain lengths. Whether this implies different effects on health is a completely different proposition. And, of course, it's well-known today that your LDL-C measurement is a poor predictor of health risk, and it certainly doesn't seem to be the proximate cause of disease.
Dairy contains SCFAs and MCFAs, so one might look at societies that consume dairy products as a primary food source. So yes, maybe "more research is needed" there.
However, the standing advice is simply to avoid all "animal fats". But lard, for example, is about 50% oleic acid (yes, the supposedly wonderful monounsaturated fat in olive oil) and 30% palmitic acid (identical to the palmitic acid used by human bodies for energy storage). Chicken fat is 25% palmitic acid, 35% oleic, and 20% linoleic acid (also a common component of seed oils). So why are we told to avoid lard and chicken fat, and replace them with sunflower oil? The differences between them seem trivial. If the problem now is "short- and medium-chain fatty acids" - well, there are none in animal fats.
Sounds like the proponents of the low fat mantra are desperately searching for ever more obscure reasons to support their argument.
Meanwhile in the uk news today, the government is rolling out a cholesterol vaccine to replace statin tablets and and parents are being advised to make their child’s lunchboxes more healthy by basing them on low fat high carb foods.
>> Sounds like the proponents of the low fat mantra are desperately searching for ever more obscure reasons to support their argument.
Exactly how it seems to me. How much more of this dissembling do we have to put up with before they finally hold their hands up and say, OK, fine, it was all wrong - sorry.
The idea of a "cholesterol vaccine" scares the c**p out of me. The lunatics are taking over the asylum.
As for the lunchboxes ... I guess they have to line up the next batch of clients for statin therapy after their parents die of ... uh, whatever the doctors are doing to them.
The latest evidence does point to saturated fat getting a bad rap. We are now moving into a new realm of understanding genetics and the microbiome. It does seem that for some individuals lowering saturated fats could be very beneficial. Understanding one's genes and the state of one's health are extremely important in making choices that can benefit individual health.
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