Study Replacing Saturated Fats with Vegetable Fats Potentially Harmful

[CFC]

Interesting article from Scientific American (via Stat magazine) that I came upon today after reading a bit about fats. I'm not sure if we posted this up before, but I don't think so.

I'll post up a link to the whole article below, but among the interesting findings of this surprisingly robust and controlled data is that the switch away from animal fats may be considerably more harmful than we've recently been starting to discover, and in quite an unexpected way as well:

Records were made on 9,423 study participants, ages 20 to 97, all living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home. It was the largest experiment of its kind.

It was also one of the most rigorous. Participants were randomly assigned either to the group eating the then-standard diet, which was high in animal fats and margarines, or to a group in which vegetable oil and corn oil margarine replaced about half of those saturated fats. Such a randomized controlled trial is considered less likely to produce misleading results than observational studies, in which volunteers eat whatever they choose. Observational studies are weaker than randomized ones because people who eat one way, rather than another, might have characteristics that benefit their heart health.

And because the Minnesota participants were in institutions that prepared all their meals and kept records, the scientists knew exactly what they ate for up to 56 months. Many nutrition studies have foundered because people misremember, or lie about, what they ate.

Analyzing the reams of old records, Ramsden and his team found, in line with the “diet-heart hypothesis,” that substituting vegetable oils lowered total blood cholesterol levels, by an average of 14 percent.

But that lowered cholesterol did not help people live longer. Instead, the lower cholesterol fell, the higher the risk of dying: 22 percent higher for every 30-point fall. Nor did the corn-oil group have less atherosclerosis or fewer heart attacks.

You can read the rest here

 

[Genetic Freak]

I think the link goes to this study, I thought I'd posted it here, must have been elsewhere:

Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice
Raw data from a 40-year-old study raises new questions about fats:

Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes.
Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid.

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/353/bmj.i1246.full.pdf

We knew about the harms of vegetable oils 40 years ago, but did nothing..!!