16 thoughts on “Saturated Fat”

  1. It’s not only doctors, but people in general. I am 5′ 10″ and 160 lbs, just 5 pounds higher than my optimal weight. Pants waist size ranges from 32 to 34, depending on the brand.

    People ask me why I look so trim and I tell them it’s the paleo diet. Usually, they just move on to another topic. There is never any question about this “caveman diet.” It’s as if they can’t put two and two together. I will hear them in other conversations say things like, “saturated fat is bad” and, “it’s all about calories.” Yet they remain anywhere from 30 to 200 pounds overweight.

    That’s people for ya.

    1. The heart isn’t the issue. The problem with a protein diet is it increases pressure on the kidneys because they’re used to process proteins. It can also cause arthritis because of accumulation of uric acid on the tissue in the joints. I’ve been there. I was fine for like 2-3 years but then I got the symptoms. It is a great way to lose weight but it is better to have a properly balanced diet.

      1. You have to eat a lot of meat to get the type of protein problems you’re discussing. Remember, the fuel of a paleo diet is fat, not protein, so increase your fats. I seem to be an evangelist for Mark Sisson, but his site answers a lot of questions and he backs it up with the latest studies. (He will also change his mind when the evidence changes.)

        http://www.marksdailyapple.com/protein-kidneys/

        The red meat study from a couple of years ago wasn’t a real, scientific study–it was an observational study meant only to look for anomalies. But our science-ignorant media took it as gospel.

        1. It’s a game of probabilities. If you go with the big studies, you are likely to get the same results, but not guaranteed. Everyone has a few quirks one way or another, and it is likely that, among all such studies, you will personally have results that deviate from the majority of people at some point. The most you can say is, this did or did not work for me, YMMV.

          1. People have quirks, and there’s biology. We have an obesity epidemic because of too much sugar and carbs. That’s a fact. People come to your conclusion because they hear too many contradictory studies put out by an ignorant press and a government that got its ideas from inconclusive science in the 1960s.

          2. My point was that Godzilla may have developed problems that you, or the majority of people in a given study, do not experience.

            But, since you brought it up – no, I do not believe in silver bullets anymore. 40 years ago, you might have said “We have an obesity epidemic because of too much fat in our diets. That’s a fact.”

            I have watched one friend or family member after another embrace the latest fad diet. They never seem to tire of it. And, it always starts with excitedly saying how they think it is working, and then it just sort of fades away, while the blubber remains. The only success stories I have seen are when they actually lower the amount they eat, and keep it there.

            We have an obesity epidemic because people eat more than they need to for their levels of physical activity, which have been steadily declining over time.

          3. I certainly understand your skepticism, but believe it or not, there is real science out there. What you are referring to with regards to fat was never science in the first place. It was the result of government involvement in a relatively new science and a media willing to sensationalize everything for a profit.

            What I told Godzilla was to eat more fats, not protein. If a doctor told him he had a problem with protein, then he should do what the doctor says, not me. But I hear people make this comment all the time about protein. That’s why I added the link because Sisson is quite thorough on his blog posts.

            Paleo is not a fad, it is eating the food that is good for you. That is all. I understand why people think it is a fad–but as I pointed out above, I am trim because of Paleo. So is everybody I know that has done it. Our culture went off the tracks in the early seventies by banning fats and are only now coming back to sanity.

        2. I tried a lot of weird diets. At some other point I was only eating spinach and scrambled eggs. That one was particularly bad as I couldn’t sleep properly at night anymore. The eggs kind of helped but it wasn’t enough for me to sleep properly. I have to say the Paleo diet, or one of the other meat based diets, is something you can live on and you will lose weight and feel great in the initial couple of years but in the long run you will get kidney and arthritis problems because of the uric acid. I had those issues even when drinking lots of water as advised.

          You have to see that the Paleo diet starts with a wrong premise to begin with. Besides hunters there were gatherers in the Paleolithic. People ate nuts, berries, and some roots. Wild carrots for example. Not just meat or fish. Esquimos ate lots of fish and meat because of the climate around their area of living but they aren’t known for living long lives. The Japanese live long lives. Modern Japanese eat a diet mostly of rice, beans, and fish or meat with lots of vegetables and soup. Japanese typically avoided dairy products and especially cheese in their diet. Those are basically the things in common in most countries with long longevities. People eat lots of fish.

  3. Basically, when they do have any time to keep up with the literature, much of it remains bogus.

    People know this and are skeptical of all nutrition “science”, which makes it hard for stuff like this to get any traction. What is good nutrition changes so often that people just ignore most of what they hear and eat what they enjoy.

  4. What is needed is a malpractice class action suit against the medical bodies pushing the old discredited ideas.

  5. How does alcohol fit into a high fat low carb diet? I see these links all over but none of them talk about drinking.

    2. Alcohol is metabolized into acetate, which is on the metabolic pathway of lipid metabolism. But nothing in biology ever does one thing, so this may not mean anything.

  7. The problem is that there are so many confounding factors that it is generally difficult to get a clear SNR, so confirmation bias gets substituted. Not unlike in many other realms (achoo! – global warming).

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