I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)

Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.

> 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.

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.

You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C....

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.

> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader

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

The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.

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.

> 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.

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".

But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.

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Such "science" should be illegal.