Comment by woko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woko | Hacker News Reader

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True. The "root cause" could be that one improves one's diet:

- if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,

- if you eat sardines as part of a meal, I suspect that you are likely to *replace* parts of your current diet with the (fatty) fish, rather than keep your usual diet and add fish on top of it.

For instance, a funny paragraph from section 4 (Discussion) hints that the SG (Sardine Group) must have added less olive oil to the rest of their meals:

> Another possible limitation of the study to bear in mind is the use of canned sardines in olive oil, which, despite easing distribution and consumption, present differences in MUFA content as compared to fresh sardines. Although this may have modified the pattern of lipids consumed, the SG group decreased their overall MUFA consumption. This could be due to the fact that the use of olive oil added to meals did not occur when they consumed the canned sardines and, therefore, there are no differences in its consumption with respect to CG.

NB: I don't want to dismiss any part of the article, I only want to insist that it is hard to isolate causes because of this effect of "communicating vases".

> - if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,

The way I generally describe the result of switching from no intentional diet to any trendy/FOTM/recent diet is mostly just that a person begins to give a shit about what they're eating, which results in an array of positive benefits not directly related to that diet. Ketogenic diets are a good example. People go from not caring about what they eat, regularly eating fast food, sugary snacks/drinks, deep fried carbohydrates, etc. to spending a bunch of money on expensive butter and grass fed beef. They then lose weight. Sure, ketosis is a big deal, but in reality the biggest factor in a person's weight loss/health improvement is just replacing high calorie, high sugar, high carb, high fat food with no sugar, low/no carb, reasonable calorie food. (This is not an attack on the ketogenic diet. There is plenty of research for and against it. As with all diets, if you find positive outcomes while trying it, keep doing it! The goal is health).

I think the real test would be, what positive benefits _do exist_ when a person changes nothing else but includes a pack (tin? can? box?) of high quality sardines weekly. If nothing, I feel like it kind of just falls into the category of "being specific and intentional about dietary choices brings health benefits", which isn't necessarily new or ground breaking.

This is true, just adding sardines your diet will probably do nothing for most people. It’s more about the elimination of other things we eat as well. It wasn’t until I was eating only salmon for my fat and protein source that I was able to raise my HDL from 35 to 54!.

I credit this to totally eliminating the omega-6 fats. But this is just me because I’m a genetic freak with hyperlipidemia.

The value of reducing Omega-6 is over-hyped. The issue here is that when you eat a can of sardines, you tend to not eat them with a big load of carbohydrates, like white bread, rice, pasta, fries...

Totally eliminating omega-6 from your diet can't be healthy, can it? There are only two essential fatty acids for humans and one of them (linoleic acid) is omega-6.

Well, I exaggerated to make a point. Even salmon has long chain omega 6. I soul have said "eliminating plant based omega 6" and this is just for me and my genetics. People without certain FADS1 genetics can do fine with short chain omega 3 and 6.

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