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aldarionlast Wednesday at 5:12 PM1 replyview on HN

"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"

Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.

Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...

If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...

But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.


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tsimionesculast Wednesday at 5:45 PM

You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.

The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).

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