Paleo 101: How and why you should eat like a Caveman

chaos_sl said:

Some guy on food network, some big shot food critic with his head up his own ass, was saying that the nutritional value of baby spinach is virtually nothing when raw, and that you have to actually cook it to denature the proteins or some shit, idk. I haven't been able to find any real info that backs that up though.

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Article_sl said:

One trial that actually tested the hypothesis was the Sydney Diet Heart Study, which ran from 1966 through 1973. In the trial, 458 men with coronary disease were randomized to a diet rich in linoleic acid (the predominant omega 6 PUFA in most diets) or their usual diet. Although total cholesterol was reduced by 13% in the treatment group during the study, all-cause mortality was higher in the linoleic acid group than in the control group. However, in the original publications, and consistent with the practice at the time, deaths from cardiovascular (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) deaths were not published.

Now, in a new paper published in BMJ, Christopher Ramsden and colleagues report that they were able to recover and analyze data from the original magnetic tape of the Sydney Diet Heart Study. The new mortality findings are consistent:

All cause: 17.6% in the linoleic group versus 11.8% in the control group, HR 1.62, CI 1.00-2.64)
CV disease: 17.2% versus 11%, HR 1.70, CI 1.03-2.80
CHD: 16.3% versus 10.1%, HR 1.74, CI 1.04-2.92

The investigators then used this data to perform an updated meta-analysis and found similar but nonsignificant trends for overall mortality and for cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease mortality. They concluded that their findings "could have important implications for worldwide dietary advice to substitute" polyunsaturated fatty acids for saturated fatty acids.

In an accompanying editorial, Philip Calder agrees:

These findings argue against the "saturated fat bad, omega 6 PUFA good" dogma and suggest that the American Heart Association advisory that includes the statement "higher [than 10% of energy] intakes [of omega-6 PUFAs] appear to be safe and may be even more beneficial"may be misguided.

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Crisco

A hundred years ago less than one in one hundred Americans were obese and coronary heart disease was unknown. Pneumonia, diarrhea and enteritis, and tuberculosis were the most common causes of death. Now, a century later, the two most common causes of death are coronary heart disease and cancer, which account for 75 percent of all deaths in this country. There were 500 cardiologists practicing in the U.S. in 1950. There are 30,000 of them now - a 60-fold increase for a population that has only doubled since 1950.

In 1911, Procter and Gamble started marketing Crisco as a new kind of food. The name Crisco is derived from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil. It was the first commercially marketed trans fat. Crisco was used to make candles and soap, but with electrification causing a decline in candle sales, Procter and Gamble decided to promote this new type of fat as an all-vegetable-derived shortening, which the company marketed as a "healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats." At the time Americans cooked and baked food with lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter. Procter and Gamble published a free cookbook with 615 recipes, from pound cake to lobster bisque, all of which required Crisco. The company succeeded in demonizing lard, and during the 20th century Crisco and other trans fat vegetable oils gradually replaced saturated animal fats and tropical oils in the American diet.

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Article_sl said:

Evidence Against the Lipid Hypothesis

Feeding Cholesterol to Omnivores Does Not Cause Atherosclerosis

Plants do not contain any cholesterol. Animals are the only source of cholesterol, and herbivores do not eat animal products. Rabbits, being a herbivore, are not designed to digest animal fat and cholesterol, so when it is fed high doses of cholesterol one should not be surprised if the cholesterol winds up getting stuck in any part of the poor rabbit, including its blood vessels. Feeding high doses of fat and cholesterol to omnivores, like rats and dogs, does not produce atherosclerotic lesions in them.

Other Countries with CHD-Death and Fat Consumption Data

Evidence against fat wilts upon close scrutiny. In his Six Country Study, Ancel Keys ignored data available from 16 other countries that did not fall in line with his desired graph. If he had chosen these six other countries [on the left side], or even more strikingly, these six countries [on the bottom right] he could have shown that increasing the percent of calories from fat in the diet reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease.

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Article_sl said:

If Keys had included all 22 countries in his study, the result would have been a clutter of dots like this.

In fact, it turns out that people who have highest percentage of saturated fat in their diets have the lowest risk of heart disease.

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