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Abd comments on Group rationality diary, 8/6/12 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: cata 08 August 2012 05:58AM

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Comment author: Abd 02 November 2012 10:11:01PM 2 points [-]

(Recently realized my new diet was way too high in fat, so I need to adjust it.)

There is an assumption here that high fat is Bad. There is actually a complex of assumptions, such as that cholesterol causes heart disease (not), high-fat diets cause heart disease (not), low-fat is safe, high-fat is not (not true).

Low-carb diets that are not high in fat typically fail, they are not sustainable. The science in the field of diet is largely atrocious. For a scientific perspective, I recommend Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's a tome, but Taubes is one of the best science writers in the business.

Cuitting out sugar is cutting out the most common source of high-glycemic-index carbohydrates in the diet, so that's a great step.

I can say, with confidence, this much: people can live indefinitely and with little or no harm on a diet that is high in natural fats (including animal fat), whereas a very low-fat diet is quite hazardous to health. Fat is a necessary human nutrient. Carbohydrates are not, some populations have a healthy diet with almost zero carbohydrates.

There are lots of caveats, human nutrition is complex. I highly recommend learning what is actually known, rather than what is merely popular and common, the result of powerful political decisions made thirty to forty years ago, not supported by science. Taubes covers that.

I'm betting my life on what I found when I researched cholesterol and diet. I'm 68, I have very high total cholesterol. Then again, so did my mother, who recently died at about 96. I have a great HDL/LDL ratio, low triglycerides, low C-reactive Protein, and, just to be sure, I personally paid for a cardiac CAT scan. Arteries clear. Cardiac challenge tests, I'm fine.

Comment author: Alexei 09 November 2012 05:43:27PM 0 points [-]

Thank you so much for the reply. You are right, and I have heard many of the points you made from other people, so I'm definitely changing my diet to adjust for that, rather than for popular notions of what a diet should be.