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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

[2016]

Yeah, sugar isn’t good for you. It’s a lot of concentrated calories. And possibly has some other issues as well. Probably stay well below the guidelines. An occasional sweet treat isn’t gonna kill you but don’t go guzzling down coke instead of water.

Lots of fats aren’t good for you either. Especially the saturated kind.

PS: Is there a concerted pro fat effort going on HN right now? We’ve had 1 opinion piece by a non scientist journalist paid by industry to pretend saturated fat is good for you against all evidence so far, and now we have a 2016 article being pushed up to the top defending fats without being marked as such, within hours.

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It’s a lot of concentrated calories.

It's not that dense though. Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense as sugar. Many are surprised to learn that peanuts, fatty meats, oils, butters, and granolas have more calories per gram compared to Skittles. The only way to avoid overeating fat is to make the portions sizes absurdly small. There is often a shock at learning that only a tablespoon of peanut butter, which is a miniscule amount of food, is 100 calories. It's trivially easy to adds hundreds of calories with butters and other fats.

The health of saturated fat is not "against all evidence". See e.g. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/5-studies-on-saturated-....

It's common for posts here to lack date markings that they should have. It doesn't change the conclusion of the research, except that "60 years ago" would be more accurate now.

It also seems to be common (enough that I've noticed the pattern within a couple of months) that there are suddenly two articles on related topics out of nowhere. A lot of the time, this seems to happen because someone reads the first link, browses around and find something else interesting.

Those are cherry-picked studies and the article you linked points that out. The current scientific literature points to diets high in saturated fats being linked to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

I think if someone finds low fats good for them, then there isn't much reason to shout it from the mountaintops

If someone finds high fats good for themselves, then they might feel lied to and want to shout it.

That may be reason for what youre observing.

Here's the other thread for reference[0], and yeah, something might be going on. The referenced one from yesterday is by Nina Teicholz who is meat industry paid to confuse people like us. If you read the other post, at least watch this about the author [1]. If you read that post, watch that video.

So many cases in human history are where one thing is believed, people and studies come and show that it's false, and then it takes a really long time for culture to come around to it. Earth being round, tobacco, climate change among others.

Based on what the non-industry funded science shows, saturated fat being considered any bit healthy is in the long stage of culture taking a long time to accept what the science is saying. And it's not helped by studies with industry funding that know how to skirt the edges. Many places to choose from, but here's one from Dr. Barnard talking about sugar vs saturated fats [2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957637 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkqWdY5_2-8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xeHDqBB6X0

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