OT: care for a bit of saturated fat?

Bring on the BACON!!!!!

I've been accused of being most saturated in fat...

Gawd...............I love STEAK! and BUTTER!!! Bacon yah, but pork turns my stomach. That was the first thing to go when I got my Dx.
White bread....toasted.....with a heap of butter. mmmmmmmmmm

Oh...on the milk front. Science says camel's milk is far closer to something similar to mother's milk than cow's milk...which makes no sense to our bodies btw.

Newton451 said...
Gawd...............I love STEAK! and BUTTER!!! Bacon yah, but pork turns my stomach. That was the first thing to go when I got my Dx.
White bread....toasted.....with a heap of butter. mmmmmmmmmm


Oh...on the milk front. Science says camel's milk is far closer to something similar to mother's milk than cow's milk...which makes no sense to our bodies btw.

Bring home the bacon!

From the linked article:

Somebody said...
The American Heart Association recommends restricting saturated fats to no more than 5 percent of everything you eat. On its website, the organization states that “decades of sound science” has proven saturated fat “can raise your ‘bad’ cholesterol and put you at higher risk for heart disease.”

However, some researchers question whether saturated fat is really as bad as the medical establishment says it is. One such scientist is Dr. Deanna Gibson, an immunologist, microbiologist, and associate professor of Biology at University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan Campus.............In a culture obsessed with thin, eating fat doesn’t sound very attractive. But Gibson says our biology requires that we eat some quality fat every day for good brain function and a healthy body.

“We only have three things to eat: carbohydrate, protein, and fat. For some reason, we’ve chosen in the last few decades to focus on how bad fats are in general,” Gibson said. “Your whole body depends on fat. All of our membranes are made of phospholipids. Your hormones depend on the types of fat and the amount of fat that you eat.”
Nutrition Research

The stigma against saturated fat in particular is so strong that up until the 2000s, trans-fat was promoted as a healthy alternative to saturated fat. Today, dietary guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommend eating fat from vegetable sources such as soy, corn, sunflower, and canola instead of meat and dairy fats. But Gibson suggests that conventional wisdom may be wrong again.

“We base our hypotheses on previous literature or previous assumptions, and it turns out wrong when you do the studies,” she said. “I’m often shocked about how little is scientifically known in nutrition. I wonder how we get to these assumptions, because I can’t come up with a good answer from the scientific perspective.”

Gibson’s latest study was recently published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. It showed that saturated fat is much easier on the intestines than most of the vegetable oils that are believed to be healthier. Although monounsaturated olive oil was the clear winner when it came to gut health, saturated fat still outperformed the vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and Omega 6.

“In the context of gut health, it was really clear from my study that if you had a high fat diet rich in olive oil, that was fabulous,” Gibson said. “But the big thing for me was the difference between the Omega 6 PUFAs and saturated fat. Because both were similarly pro-inflammatory, but the saturated fat actually had many protective responses that were absent in the Omega 6 group.”...............
The study was conducted on rats, but Gibson and her colleagues are planning a similar trial that will test different fats on humans with inflammatory bowel disease. While there are conflicting studies that favor PUFA oils over saturated fat, Gibson isn’t impressed by the evidence.

“We have to be more critical about the studies that we interpret. Most of the nutrition clinical trials that are out there are very poorly done, and most of the rodent studies never led to a clinical study. It doesn’t inform the next step,” she said.
Chronic Inflammation

We may not have to worry about infections or nutritional deficiencies like our ancestors did, but the modern world has its own set of health problems. The diseases that plague people today stem largely from chronic inflammation, and based on the evidence she has seen, Gibson believes that our Omega 6-heavy diets are partially to blame.

“When you eat a diet really rich in things that promote those inflammatory responses, then your body really doesn’t know how to shut that down anymore,” she said. “If we had a mixed diet, a combination of all these fats together, then it probably wouldn’t be a problem. But people today have diets that are very rich in Omega 6 and are deliberately avoiding saturated fat. That’s when it becomes really problematic.”...............
Another nutrition researcher at UBC, Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh, points to other problems with high PUFA vegetable oils. A study he published last year finds that these vegetable fats contribute to sedentary behavior and a predisposition to insulin resistance, similar to that observed in Type 2 diabetes.

“I’ve been studying fat for 12 years,” Ghosh said. “In earlier studies I found that sunflower oil was worse than palm oil, and people couldn’t believe it. But I’m convinced, and I think other people now understand, that saturated fat is not as bad as we thought.”..............
The Rise of Vegetable Oils

While many believe science alone informs dietary guidelines, Ghosh says such advice is often shaped by social, political, and economic forces. In fact, it can take decades for good scientific evidence to overcome these other influences.
“It happened with trans-fats,” Ghosh said. “We’ve known they were bad since the 1980s, and 20 years later the government finally agreed. But then all the big food companies said, ‘Hey, we can’t change our oil so fast. We need time, because the new oil changes our flavor profile.'”

According to Ghosh, the demonization of saturated fat is more of a story spun to benefit industry, rather than facts based on science. He urges people to read the article, The Oiling of America by the Weston A. Price Foundation, a food advocacy group dedicated to promoting traditional diets. The article gives a detailed history of vegetable oil marketing in America, and unpacks many unscientific reasons for why saturated fat is shunned today.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the North American oil crop farmers were getting hammered by the Malaysian and Indonesian imports of coconut oil. It’s the same thing that’s happening to the U.S. manufacturers with stuff from China today,” Ghosh said. “Essentially, no saturated fat containing plants can grow properly in North America. What we do grow is sunflower, safflower, canola, corn, etc. So from the 1950s on, saturated fat was considered to be bad.”
But what about all that “sound science” the American Heart Association says links saturated fat to heart disease? Ghosh says that when you consider how long we’ve restricted our saturated fat intake, the case against it doesn’t hold up.

“In the last 30 years, North American fat consumption has changed drastically. People used to cook with lard, but nobody does this today. We eat what is available. Everything in the market has consciously taken saturated fat out,” Ghosh said. “Our saturated fat intake has not increased over the last 30 years. So why is heart disease still rising? If saturated fat was causing this, logically it should drop if we take it out of the diet. But it’s still going up.”

According to the American Heart Association’s 2015 Heart Disease and Strokes Statistics Update, cardiovascular disease is the leading global cause of death, accounting for over 17 million deaths per year. That number is expected to grow to nearly than 24 million by 2030.

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 8/16/2016 12:08:55 PM (GMT-6)

Good point on our paleo ancestors saturated fat coming from critters and ours coming from milk and pizza.

But heck, the milk and pizza is getting us to 70 plus years whereas our paleo ancestors were lucky to make it to 30. Does anyone really think a paleo diet is good because a caveman ate it? With the advantages modern man has, we could probably double the caveman's life expectancy consuming deep fried twinkles and Thunderbird.

Newton451 said...
Slow running paleo ancestors were susceptible to fast running tyrannosaurus as well as low flying pterosaurs, which may also account for the short life expectancy...

No doubt. It was difficult to avoid dying from trauma and infectious disease in the old days. It was probably difficult to avoid an assignment change from hunter to hunted to dinner, or at least hard to avoid being killed while trying trying to obtain dinner. Very often, the designated lunch objected vigorously to said designation. And don't forget wars, mostly a young man's game.

But apparently, if you got past the "out in the field hunting" stage to the "you young guys bring me my supper" stage, looking all the way back as far as recorded history goes, it appears they lived at least as long as the longest known lifespans today. The trick appeared to be getting past those first years. Those dying young kept the averages much lower.
www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889

Somebody said...
What is commonly known as ‘average life expectancy’ is technically ‘life expectancy at birth’. In other words, it is the average number of years that a newborn baby can expect to live in a given society at a given time. But life expectancy at birth is an unhelpful statistic if the goal is to compare the health and longevity of adults. That is because a major determinant of life expectancy at birth is the child mortality rate which, in our ancient past, was extremely high, and this skews the life expectancy rate dramatically downward.

The early years from infancy through to about 15 was perilous, due to risks posed by disease, injuries, and accidents. But those who survived this hazardous period of life could well make it into old age. ................Drawing upon archaeological records, we can indeed see evidence of this. The "Old Man of La Chapelle", for example, is the name given to the remains of a Neanderthal who lived 56,000 years ago, found buried in the limestone bedrock of a small cave near La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in France in 1908. Scientists estimate that he had reached old age by the time he died, as bone had re-grown along the gums where he had lost several teeth, perhaps decades before. He lacked so many teeth in fact that scientists suspect he needed his food ground down before he was able to eat it. The old man's skeleton indicates that he also suffered from a number of afflictions, including arthritis. ..............If we look again at the estimated maximum life expectancy for prehistoric humans, which is 35 years, we can see that this does not mean that the average person living at this time died at the age of 35. Rather, it means that for every child that died in infancy, another person might have lived to be 70. The life expectancy statistic is, therefore, a deeply flawed way to think about the quality of life of our ancient ancestors.

So is modern society more beneficial for health and longevity than, say, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle? To help gain an answer to this question, scientists have compared the life span of adults in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (excluding the infant mortality rate). It was found that once infant mortality rates were removed, life span was calculated to between 70 and 80 years, the same rate as that found in contemporary industrialised societies. The difference is that, in the latter, most individuals survive childhood (Kanazawa, 2008).

It is certainly true that improvements in food availability, hygiene, nursing care, medical treatments, and cultural innovations have resulted in far fewer deaths caused by external injuries, infections, and epidemics, but on the other hand, we face a global cancer crisis that our ancient ancestors never had to contend with on such a scale. Are we just replacing one form of death with another?

Though I doubt they were Paleo, I still bet the Kings and Queens of England ate plenty of meat and saturate fat, probably far more than the average peasant who probably had a life expectancy of 40 years or so. And I bet for the most part, most of these folks escaped death due to injury that would come from hunting or hard manual labor and even wars. Although, court intrigue and assassinations might certainly have been something to watch out for. But notice the amazing fact that, even as far back as the 700s ( zero modern medicine! ), King Offa made it to 66 years(many a modern male going to the best docs dies before that age) and starting about the 1300s most of these royal types were living well past the late 60s and early mid 70s, and even in the 1600s many are making it to the late 70s. Notice that King George the 3rd ( is that George Washington's nemesis?) was born in 1738 and made it to 1820, a whopping 81.6 years! And grand finale, Queen Victoria, born in 1819, also made it 81.6 years! No heart stents, no coronary bypass surgery, no anti-biotics, no flu shots/vaccinations, no emergency C-sections for when child birth goes wrong, no chemo-therapy, RT or RPP. www.britroyals.com/aged.asp

Average age at death for American males with all of the above medical advantages? 78.8 years.

kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding-fathers-on-july-4-1776

Somebody said...
Some more ages, just for reference:

Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53

The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

John Adams age at death 91 years
Thomas Jefferson age 83 ( both died on the same day and year, July 4th 1826)
James Madison age 85
Benjamin Franklin age 84

And our maximum life expectancy advantage, even with all of our modern knowledge about medicine and diet and machines and computers, is how much exactly?

You know, it could make you wonder about diets and even at least some things about modern medicine.

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 8/16/2016 8:17:53 PM (GMT-6)

Somebody said......
"And our maximum life expectancy advantage, even with all of our modern knowledge about medicine and diet and machines and computers, is how much exactly?"

Got me thinking ..... modern medicine has really weakened the human gene pool. Darwin's survival of the fittest no longer holds in the USA. Take me for example. I should have died young, but antibiotics and surgeons allowed me to live long enough to have children .... and pass along my defective genes. If paleos or kings lived a long time it was because their parents passed along good genes (and they did not get stepped on by a woolly mammoth).

Men and women did not compete with Dino's. They did compete with malnutrition, trauma and infection. Once we had antibiotics our life expectancy nearly doubled in just a decade or so. That, seat belts and not smoking have got Americans and most Europeans to about age 80 for an average life span.

JNF, absolutely. The death rate of non-fatally injured soldiers in WWII was dramatically lower than in any previous war because of the discovery of the Sulfa drugs in the 1930's.

One of the paleontological tidbits that I picked up somewhere had the discovery of a perfect "clovis" point between two neck vertebrae of a wooly Mammoth. Consider how it got there. Some guy (and yes, ladies it WAS probably a guy), had a brand new spear, jumped up on the back of a Mammoth, and with a lucky stroke impaled his spear downwards into the neck of the critter and killed it instantly. What were the odds of him surviving that encounter?

Back to the OP...it really IS about moderation. Something we're not very good at.