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Science

Replacing Butter With Vegetable Oils Doesn't Decrease Risk of Heart Disease, Says Study (medicalxpress.com) 190

Posted by msmash from the never-ending-butter-vs-oil-saga dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional "heart healthy" practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be done on that front. This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this dietary intervention. The analyses show that interventions using linoleic acid-rich oils failed to reduce heart disease and overall mortality even though the intervention reduced cholesterol levels. In the Minnesota study, participants who had greater reduction in serum cholesterol had higher rather than lower risk of death. Two things to note about the study: 75% of the participants left in less than a year (perhaps not uncommon, the study doesn't explain why these people left); the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).
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Replacing Butter With Vegetable Oils Doesn't Decrease Risk of Heart Disease, Says Study More

Replacing Butter With Vegetable Oils Doesn't Decrease Risk of Heart Disease, Says Study

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  • and it never did (Score:5, Interesting)

    by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:03PM (#51902655)
    see Scott Adams: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1... [dilbert.com]

    • Re:and it never did (Score:5, Informative)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:30PM (#51902919) Journal

      I don't think that diet and fitness are a science fail. They are a pseudo-science fail.

      These disciplines (if even that word is applicable) have been systematically promulgated without the benefit of real science. Now that real scientific methods are being used, the assumptions that were used to derive the advice people were given are (in many cases) proving to be false.

      • I don't think that diet and fitness are a science fail. They are a pseudo-science fail.

        At this point what fields are not at least half pseudo-science? Certainly everything that makes it to press can be classified as such.

        • Fair enough but there is a pretty solid argument to make that a huge chunk of health science is pseudo science.

          Studying the interaction of a molecule with bacteria under a microscope is certainly science but the "studies" that follow are definitely soft science if not pseudo science.

          Technically, if you are using the scientific method, it's science, period but the word has taken on a firmer meaning in modern society to mean definitive and highly controlled studies leading to solid, I can send you to the moon
          • I'm not convinced "Studying the interaction of a molecule with bacteria under a microscope is certainly science"

            To me, this is a scientific like thing, but I think disassembling the bacteria into its individual atoms and understanding how the bacteria is built well enough to reassemble it is science.

            This is about as much science as running up to a 300kg gorilla and smacking it in the nose to see if you can get away from him before he rips your arms from your body is.

            Simply poking something with something el

      • Re:and it never did (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:56PM (#51903119)

        I don't think that diet and fitness are a science fail. They are a pseudo-science fail.

        Plenty of mainstream scientific institutions pushed the "high carb, low fat" diet for an entire generation. The government promoted carbs and spent billions subsidizing high carb diets (and, of course, the subsidies continue to be paid, as all subsidies do, even though they are now recognized as a mistake). To claim that it was all mere pseudo-science is just a No True Scotsman [wikipedia.org] fallacy. Nobody was calling it pseudo-science back in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact it was the opposite: most scientists attacked Atkins and others as "frauds" when they questioned the prevailing dogma.

        This was a colossal failure of the scientific establishment, and you cannot just hand-wave that away.

      • Re:and it never did (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @05:57PM (#51903605)

        The researches were saying all along, "don't change your diet; don't stop eating butter; adopt the traditional guidelines of eating a balanced diet with lots of vegetables and not a lot of added sugars or fats."

        They were also saying about saturated fat that "it is probably not all saturated fats, we don't know which ones are dangerous yet, don't change your diet just wait for more research to uncover the details." And the news would even repeat that... and then spend 5 minutes talking about how to change your diet to eliminate butter!

        People are idiots, and then later when the researchers were proved right in every part of what they were saying... people just blame them for whatever the media said, or wherever pop culture wandered.

        Once transfats were found to be harmful, a lot of researchers were saying right away, "this is good news because none of the traditional fats like butter that people miss are high in transfat. This looks like an issue with certain processed fats, and companies can simply change their recipes."

        People still can't figure out what the science says. My advice, if you can't follow the details without getting led around by the nose by the media, just eat "grandma foods" and you'll already be following all the best research, medical advice, and government recommendations.

        • just eat "grandma foods"

          And work "grandma jobs", live "grandma lives" and last but not least - have "grandma child mortality rate".
          How many grandma's siblings never made to puberty - while their genes did?

          It's not that simple.
          What back in grandma's days was a rare occurrence (be it chocolate cake or a rare genetic trait) is MUCH more common now, with all these extra humans and all these resources at our disposal.
          One of the reasons why we have all these dietary medical issues now is that back in grandma's days people who had them w

          • Uhhh... I'm wasn't talking about "world hunger." There is plenty of food for that, hunger is caused by non-food-related problems and is off topic here.

            You do not actually make any point to support your claim that eating "grandma foods" does not solve the problem of good nutrition. I'll stick with what the nutrition researchers recommend by consensus; traditional whole foods.

      • Last I checked (and I check often), we have about as much idea how the mitochondria of a organic cell functioned as we do about the cultural habits of a octoped race from planet Kolob. We have absolutely no idea how cells work and we sure as hell have back asswards ideas about how the human body works. We try to apply science to things like nutrition and diet, but the truth is, we have absolutely no idea how the body works and we pretty much just guess our way along.

        Don't get me wrong... I don't want us to

    • The problem is that what is good and bad for you is not as simple as we once thought.

      Recommendations where based on the best science we knew at at the time. However, that science was still in the very early stages.

      It has only been very recently that we have started to learn how important gut bacteria are and the role they play in your health. Your particular genetic and genetics also play a major role. It is likely there is no one best diet for humans. There won't even be one best diet for certain ethnic gr

      • Re:and it never did (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @08:49PM (#51904559)

        Recommendations where based on the best science we knew at at the time. However, that science was still in the very early stages.

        No, that's not quite true. As with many studies in science, there were broad conclusions drawn on the basis of indirect data. It's very common to read a study that collected data on A and B, but the "discussion section" at the end notes that B is also potentially related to C and D.

        Other articles note this potential association connecting A to C and D, and eventually that becomes dogma within a discipline... unless it is tested directly. Example in nutritional science is the old belief that all high-cholesterol foods (e.g., eggs) must be bad because high blood cholesterol levels seem to be bad. Except no one until recently really tried to consider whether high-cholesterol foods actually CAUSE high blood cholesterol levels. Turns out they have a relatively small impact, because the body manufactures most of the cholesterol within the body. So intake of cholesterol often has a relatively small impact compared to internal body regulation and function.

        Thus, the "science" wasn't really "in the early stages." Instead, people made broad assumptions based on incorrect physical models. They measured a correlation between A and B, but assumed it must apply to cases involving C, D, E, and F, just because it seemed "intuitive." But "intuition" is not science, and models based on no empirical evidence (as many physiological assumptions were in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which laid the basis for nutrition science until recently) aren't very good science. It wasn't just "in the early stages" -- it was really incomplete and rife with unsupported conclusions.

        There are lots of things we can say in general and while they are right on average within people of the similar descent they won't be anywhere close to absolute.

        One of the fascinating things about biology is there are experiments I can do 100x and get almost that many different results. Biology has randomness, it has mutations, and nothing is every simple.

        What you say is true -- and it is quite hard to design good experiments on something as broad as nutrition, which usually has huge numbers of uncontrolled variables. It's not just "randomness," though. It's that it's really expensive and difficult to do studies where you lock people up for a few years and control their complete dietary input... which is what you'd really need to do a proper test of many nutritional hypotheses. And you're right that there are variations in genetics and individuals that sometimes argue against generalizations.

        On the other hand, many of the BIG failures in nutritional science weren't due to these little nuances of individuals. They were based on broad misinterpretations of data and drawing overly broad conclusions from that data... usually based on all sorts of underlying assumptions that were never tested directly.

        These are flaws in the way scientific methods were applied. And they shouldn't just be "swept under the rug" because "humans are complex and we now realize that more."

    • What Scott Adams said.

      Basically, nobody knows a gods-be-damned thing. It's all a bunch of guesses, some of them more educated than others. Even 'calories in, calories out' and 'move more, eat less' gets disputed, because for some reason it doesn't seem to work 100% of the time for 100% of people (although I have my own personal suspicions about the 'why' of that, but I'll keep them to myself).

      I actually read this news story elsewhere earlier today; it's worth noting that in the actual article, the results

    • It's funny when you follow the links [motherjones.com] and quickly see the scientists failing economics. This is because they're not economists. "Growing world population will strain natural resources"? That happened at either 60 or 130 million humans; welcome to scarcity and technological growth.

      The other big one is the space station as a good investment for the country, and a smaller consideration for biofuel. Childlike fascination and a misunderstanding of economics confuse "X is tangentially related to or was invo

    • Wow that's a really stupid blog post. He even admits that it's not the science what was wrong but the reporting, and then blames science anyway because apparently the scientists should have forced their way into his brain.

      He then claims that science controls the media (via it's winged monkeys). That is possible the single stupidest and plain wrongest point in the entire blog post.

      He also keeps claiming that "science" ha failed on food and exercise. He keeps making this claim and only every mentions food. T

  • This is not surprising, considering .... (Score:5, Informative)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:12PM (#51902727)

    Most of the dietary advice we have been fed (pun intended) in the last 50 years or so is not based on any real science.
    I could go into details, but I am not the expert. Listen to people much smarter than me. Watch this video as a primer: https://vimeo.com/45485034 [vimeo.com]

    Then go read Good Calories Bad Calories, and The Primal Blueprint.

    Personally, I have been grain and grain product free for 3 years by following the principles put in the above (and some other) resources. No low-fat BS, no whole-grain BS. No fad diets. I won't preach, just do a little research on your own. Once the physical addiction to carbs/sugar was broken, my body doesn't want them anymore. I'm in my 40s, and I only wish I could have done this earlier in my life.

  • This study used a dataset of 1968-1973. At that time, processing techniques created a lot of trans fats in making the replacement products. Those trans fats have their own effect. Processes have now been changed, so that data set doesn't relate to what would happen with today's use of those same foods.

    That said, you can pry my Kerrygold butter from my pudgy, pasty hands!

  • Margarine was never considered healthy by some people because they already understood that the state of saturation is a gross simplification of the issue when structure, chain length and conformation have such a large influence on the specific bioactivity of each of the huge number of molecules that constitute lipids, not to mention the impact of the volume ratios of the types consumed. If you didn't already know this you should stop getting your knowledge from the fools in the media and actually study some science.

    • However, at least for me, it is about what margarine isn't rather than what it is.

      Margarine is not derived from a poor animal who is forced to be pregnant her whole life and stand in a stall with suction tubes attached. Margarine is one of the easier vegetarian options because it is a 1 for 1 replacement for butter.

      • Margarine is one of the easier vegetarian options because it is a 1 for 1 replacement for butter.

        You mean vegan, not vegetarian and it's actually not, because most margarine has dairy products in it annoyingly enough. I know this because it means it winds up with a bit of lactose in it, which is annoying. There are only a few brands which a re dairy free.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        Margarine can contain animal products.
        Really, the only good thing with margarine is that it is cheap. It started as a cheap substitute for butter and it still is.

        • I grew up eating lots of foods fried in margarine. We even ate the leftover margarine from the pan as 'sauce' on potatoes. After the whole transfats thing was exposed, I completely switched away from margarine and started using oils and butter instead. I've also been taking the "easy way" out and using butter-based spreads that combine butter with canola oil to reduce the amount of saturated fats, but apparently those can contain trans fats as well, due to the refining used on the canola oil, so maybe strai

  • using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter .....

    the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).

    Ummm..this looks wrong. The most common two cooking oils [statista.com] in the USA are Soybean Oil and Canola Oil. Soybean alone dwarfs everything else put together (but I threw in Canola because that's what my family uses for most needs). Soybean oil is a bit over 50% linoleic acid. Canola is about 20%.

    So if you live and eat in the USA, this probably applies to you.

  • shortcuts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @06:07PM (#51903659) Journal
    tl;dr: there are no shortcuts in nutrition, you can't eat tons of fatty food and be healthy just by eating the right fatty foods, you have to exercise actual self control, and you should exercise too.

    • And it doesn't even have to be complicated. In fact, you're probably more likely to succeed by adhering to a few simple rules rather than a huge complicated "don't eat this! Eat this instead!" regimen.

      Personally, I follow the No 'S' Diet, which anyone should be able to follow without much trouble or any undue financial burden: http://nosdiet.com/ [nosdiet.com]

  • 75% of the participants left in less than a year

    They died from heard disease?

  • For deep frying, use lard or canola oil. Deep frying with lard gets you a better result, and it's likely better for you, but canola is monumentally more convenient for occasional home use.

    For baking or anything high temperature, use butter.

    For all other cooking, use olive oil or butter, your choice.

    PS: Peanut oil tastes like fucking ass. Fuck you if you deep fry a turkey (or anything else) in peanut oil.

    PPS: The perfect french fry is achieved by: Peeling, cutting to size and shape, rinsing in cold wate

    • Empirical data based on repeatable science just doesn't have that 'feel good' ring to it. The USG seems to prefer half-baked ideas based on trendy hypotheses that are difficult to prove out - especially when underfunded or outright blacklisted. Imagine trying to get a "butter is actually healthy for you" paper funded and peer-reviewed in 1980. As is frequently the case with government funded science, they get what we pay for.

    • I've used butter for pie crusts, and the result is not a light, flaky crust.
      Olive oil has a distinctive flavor that is not necessarily pleasant, depending on what it's used in.

    • Brining (or pre-salting) is good for any meat. I pre-salt my steaks and pork chops at least 15 minutes in advance, and it really does improve the flavor and tenderness, because it lets the salt penetrate into the meat instead of just sitting on the surface. It can also help pull other flavors into the meat through osmosis.

      One of the best tricks I've learned is to pre-salt fish with a bit of sugar as well. Pre-salted lightly sugared fresh mackerel, fried skin side down is ridiculously tasty.

  • omega-3 : omega-6 fatty acids ratio (Score:3)

    by codeButcher ( 223668 ) on Thursday April 14, 2016 @05:06AM (#51906185)

    The article states that the recommendation is to replace butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid.

    Linoleic acid is an omega-6 fatty acid. Science seems to be inclined these days to the consensus that fatty acids should rather be fairly balanced between omega-6 and omega-3 (due to competition for rate-limiting enzymes in the body). Opinions for a good ratio range from 4, down to 1, (omega-6) against 1 (omega-3). However, most modern crops (and the oil gained from them) are rich in omega-6 fatty acids: corn, soy, sunflower, wheat... Expensive products like extra virgin, cold-pressed olive, flax (linseed) and macadamia oil seem to be fairly balanced or have more omega-3 than omega-6.

    Also, because these fatty acids are "essential" (meaning they need to be obtained from diet and can't be synthesized in the body), modern agricultural practices of feeding or finishing off livestock on the above-mentioned crops means that their products (meat, eggs, milk, butter, cheese...) also exhibits an omega-6:omega-3 ratio that is heavily skewed towards omega-6. When animals and poultry are pasture fed (and not just allowed to roam free on bare ground, still being fed on these crops), the ratio starts to be much more balanced. Apparently, green spring growth is the most beneficial (producing rich yellow butter), and chickens need to hunt for insects, larvae etc., which also produces much richer yellow yolks (and better tasting eggs, from own experience).

    Modern western diets however often show a 10:1 or even 16:1 ratio of omega-6:omega-3 - right in line with the recommendations, but apparently quite unhealthy. The reason for this is that omega-6 fatty acids promote inflammation and also storing of fat, while omega-3 does the opposite. (That's why those crops work so well to quickly fatten up the animals before slaughter).

    Of course, both inflammation and fat storage have their purpose in maintaining a healthy organism, but it needs to be balanced out with the opposing process - once it becomes a runaway process, then problems start to occur. Many medical practitioners these days are aware of the role inflammation plays in coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and a slew of other modern "lifestyle" diseases.

    References: You may read the Wikipedia pages on Omega-6 fatty acids and Omega-3 fatty acids on your own. This one section however may be a good introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-6_fatty_acid#Suggested_negative_health_effects [wikipedia.org]. Many explanations of promoters of modern diet plans (paleo, clean eating, banting) might include some of the same information, the book "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon (a dietician) is an extensive tome on this theme and includes many further sources.

    Yes, of course the above-mentioned omega-6:omega-3 ratio is just one factor and a simplification to boot. There are other fatty acids; various sugars also come into play regarding inflammation and obesity; then processed foods (trans fats, oxidized cholesterol, etc.) are apparently quite harmful, and don't forget about the various negative effects of chemicals like pesticides and preservatives... By and large, it seems to be more prudent to eat as much "natural" foods as possible (food grown on plants and not food manufactured in plants); often this then needs to be a DIY approach as even in food the market seems to be for (cheap) quantity over quality. Obviously, producing your own food is not possible or at least easy for city-dwellers. Some basic reading I've done a while back shows that one would need around 120 square meters of arable land per adult to produce a sufficient but mainly vegetarian diet, including eggs, and maybe the occasional chicken - for red meat the size needed does increase considerably.

  • We have known this for a long time already.

    Plus, butter is way tastier!

  • This information seems to be presented in a deliberately misleading way. We should not be surprised that so many posters here have completely misunderstood the results of the study.

    This study does not say that butter, saturated fats, triglycerides, or cholesterol have been proved healthy. Far from it.

    Rather, this study seems to indicate that linoleic acid is so horribly unhealthy that it compares to butter.

    Furthermore, linoleic acid is *not* commonly used in margarine. Direct quote from the post: "the veget

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