MarkKol

Why is Bryan Johnson so obsessed with with supplements?

63 posts in this topic

10 minutes ago, Jason Actualization said:

Fair enough. I recognize that my nutritional philosophy is deemed appalling by many/most, and that's perfectly fine.

I will be posting a 360 health review of mine by the end of this year, showing everything from a DEXA scan, to a lipid panel, full hormonal workup, erythrocyte phospholipid fatty acid composition, metabolic markers such as A1c and fasting insulin, inflammatory markers such as CRP, continuous glucose monitor (CGM) results, oral glucose tolerance test, linoleic acid adipose tissue biopsy, upper endoscopy, oxidized LDL, etc.

To me, nutrition, as with anything else in life, shouldn't be that complicated. Yes, it's complex but not that complicated. I have already done my research on cow's milk and I am satisfied with what I have found. I don't really need to go through all those complications, just the basics and a little extra knowledge.  But please don't assume I'm negating your words, just not for me. I'm a very simple girl and I don't want to complicate nutrition too much. I respect your abilities as far as nutrition goes but I don't delve too deep with too many fancy terminologies. Please continue to share with me, though, anything you deem necessary that I may find of value.

Edited by Princess Arabia

Know thyself....

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18 minutes ago, Princess Arabia said:

To me, nutrition, as with anything else in life, shouldn't be that complicated. Yes, it's complex but not that complicated. I have already done my research on cow's milk and I am satisfied with what I have found. I don't really need to go through all those complications, just the basics and a little extra knowledge.  But please don't assume I'm negating your words, just not for me. I'm a very simple girl and I don't want to complicate nutrition too much. I respect your abilities as far as nutrition goes but I don't delve too deep with too many fancy terminologies. Please continue to share with me, though, anything you deem necessary that I may find of value.

The most valuable thing you could do is minimize your omega-6 fat intake.

The greatest misconception nutritionally is that we need to consume 17 grams of linoleic acid per day, whereas I'm consuming less than 4 grams.

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7 minutes ago, Jason Actualization said:

The most valuable thing you could do is minimize your omega-6 fat intake.

The greatest misconception nutritionally is that we need to consume 17 grams of linoleic acid per day, whereas I'm consuming less than 4 grams.

Udo's oil 3-6-9 is good. I take that from time to time as I know the importance of the omega's. Coq-10 is important too as is B12, magnesium/potassium ratio amongst other vitamins. 


Know thyself....

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On 9/6/2023 at 8:40 AM, Jason Actualization said:

The evidence I can offer you is fundamentally formatted differently than the evidence you are accustomed to immersing yourself in. How serious, from a scale of 1-10, are you about honestly exploring my dietary philosophy?

Offer me your evidence and explain why it's superior to mine :)


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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53 minutes ago, Jason Actualization said:

The most valuable thing you could do is minimize your omega-6 fat intake

Can you provide a proposition to this statement and clarify it? 


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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11 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Offer me your evidence and explain why it's superior to mine :)

It's superior because it's based off of ACTION (not intellectualizing) and real world results. I suspect you are quick to dismiss anecdotes, but what could possibly be more important than real human experiences? If everyone told you that drinking cow's milk was inflammatory and going to give you acne, and yet, you drank 2 gallons of whole milk every week, had more muscle and strength, less fat, and a better facial complexion than everyone who told you not to drink the milk, would you continue consuming it?

The evidence is my superior health, which I am suggesting is replicable if you replicate my action steps.

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11 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Can you provide a proposition to this statement and clarify it? 

Yes, here is the most important 18 word statement I ever anticipate communicating about nutrition...

Consuming more polyunsaturated fat than that found in nature will slowly oxidize your body and cause chronic disease.

Saturated fat has merely been the scapegoat for the excess polyunsaturated fats that are inducing overwhelming oxidative stress in the human beings who consume them (I used to be one such human).

How my life has changed since eliminating all industrial seed oils (omega-6 bombs) and limiting my polyunsaturated fat intake to <10% of total dietary fat while eating >50% of my dietary fat as saturated:

1. I reversed a rare, "incurable" disease called eosinophilic esophagitis.

2. I "outgrew" any and all signs/symptoms of environmental allergens (cats, dust mites, pollen, golden rod all used to affect me)

3. I no longer have exercise-induced asthma

4. I no longer have light-level autism (i.e., I can cold approach any stranger and immediately befriend and understand them emotionally).

5. I have been pharma-free for 8 years (a gastroenterologist and allergist had me on swallowed corticosteroids, proton pump inhibitors, and leukotriene antagonists for life).

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Okay,

From what it seems to me, you're very passionate about your beliefs and you seem to be dead-set in your personal anecdotes for the diet you're preaching. That's fine.

What I'm mostly worried about is you preaching this diet to the people on the forum and saying that it is the way to best way to eat and that this will reverse their chronic diseases. I understand why you're coming from this place given your own experience, but based on the evidence done on MILLIONS of people, the epidemiology of this diet seems to result in unfavorable health outcomes. Not to mention it demonizes many food groups and will most likely lead to an eating disorder for most people. For someone who isn't very well versed in nutrition, they might see your posts and start eating in a way that will, worst case scenario, have their risk of CVD and cancer increase drastically. Or, they could see the short-term benefits that you've seen, I'm not denying that.

But do remember, misinformation kills people.

Let's start with your claims:

9 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

If everyone told you that drinking cow's milk was inflammatory and going to give you acne, and yet, you drank 2 gallons of whole milk every week, had more muscle and strength, less fat, and a better facial complexion than everyone who told you not to drink the milk, would you continue consuming it?

If everyone told you that smoking cigarettes was highly addictive and hazardous to your health yet when you smoked a pack a day you felt happier, more clear, more energized, and well-rounded, would you still continue smoking cigarettes despite what the evidence says?

 

9 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

Consuming more polyunsaturated fat than that found in nature will slowly oxidize your body and cause chronic disease.

 

This is wrong on so many levels. I don't even know where to begin.

First off, this is just a blatant appeal to nature fallacy. Might I remind you of a little thing called Antagonistic Pleiotropy? This is the biological phenomenon wherein an individual's genes will favor and select for traits that prioritize short-term survival and reproductive success over long-term survival.

As you know, genetics are a tricky and counter-intuitive thing. Many things effect whether genes are turned on and turned off, so you can't just boil things down to genetics, enviornment and diet play a huge part in it. It's very individualized.

Each one of us has a unique biology - even identical twins!

Identical twins who grew up in a different environments will have different genetics. With that in mind, this is the reason behind how eating an ancestral diet will result in long-term detrimental health outcomes.

TLDR: we shouldn't look to the amount of polyunsaturated fat our ancestors ate, we need something more robust. This is where human outcome data comes into the mix of things :)

I'll link here some meta-analysis studies done regarding polyunsaturated fat intake and oxidation / chronic disease. I'm well aware that me and your views differ drastically when it comes to the hierarchy of evidence, but I'm mostly doing this in case others want to see it for themselves.

On one hand we have close to half a million participants health outcome data (more on that later), and then we have you and your anecdotal experience. I'm not dismissing your own experience by any means, what I'm trying to get across is the fact that the epidemiology of what your preaching seems to be in direct contradiction.

9 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

Saturated fat has merely been the scapegoat for the excess polyunsaturated fats that are inducing overwhelming oxidative stress in the human beings who consume them (I used to be one such human).

This is also blatantly wrong on so many levels.

Here are the two studies that many people who share your beliefs about saturated fat might cite. It's also why the Time Magazine Issue titled "Eat Butter" came out an generated a media firestorm.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24723079/[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/

These studies looked at people who eating varying amounts of saturated fat and they found they had similar rates of CVD. It's hard to see through this type of study because of many confounding factors (the people on the low saturated fat group may have been eating other things that contributed to that outcome).

Here's a study done to clarify the findings of the previous one. Harvard researchers told people to limit their SFA intake and replace it with PUFAs and MUFAs from nuts and seeds, and what they found was that they had lower rates of CHD risk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4593072/

"Higher intakes of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and carbohydrates from whole grains were significantly associated with lower risk of CHD"

They also had a group that ate refined grains and what they found is that their risk remained the same.

So, we can conclude that the previous two studies linked above weren't robust enough and when SFA is replaced with healthier forms of fat, risk of CVD goes down.

But that's CVD risk, what about oxidative stress?

I'd assume by oxidative stress you're also inferring that this leads to atherosclerosis like you said in previous posts, but there simply isn't enough evidence to say with absolute certainty that this is the case yet. What we need is a multitude of repeated RCTs and human outcome data before we can say something like that for sure.

The best metric we have currently is ApoB, which I will cover later.

Anyways, here are the effects of high polyunsaturated fat diets and CVD risk:

This epidemiological study analyzed 521,120 individuals and here were their findings:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33853582/

"Consumption of butter and margarine was associated with higher total and cardiometabolic mortality. Replacing butter and margarine with canola oil, corn oil, or olive oil was related to lower total and cardiometabolic mortality. Our findings support shifting the intake from solid fats to non-hydrogenated vegetable oils for cardiometabolic health and longevity."

Finally, a Cochrane systematic review, a HIGHLY respected medicine journal that pooled together all available randomized clinical trials done on this topic. It had to meet certain criteria of course, like having to be compared with a higher saturated fat intake, intending to reduce SFA intake or include MUFAs or PUFAs, lasting at least 2 years. Here were their results.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD011737.pub3/full

"Replacing the energy from saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat or carbohydrate appear to be useful strategies, while effects of replacement with monounsaturated fat are unclear. The reduction in combined cardiovascular events resulting from reducing saturated fat did not alter by study duration, sex or baseline level of cardiovascular risk, but greater reduction in saturated fat caused greater reductions in cardiovascular events."

But this is epidemiology. Isn't this inaccurate?

No.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34308960/

"Comparing both bodies of evidence from Cohort Studies, the difference in the results was also small (RRR: 0.92; 95% CI: 0.88, 0.96). Our findings suggest that bodies of evidence from randomized control trials and cohort studies are often quantitatively concordant. Prospective systematic reviews in nutrition research should include, whenever possible, bodies of evidence from randomized control trials and cohort studies on dietary intake and biomarkers of intake to provide the whole picture for an investigated diet-disease association."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8803500/bin/nmab095fig1.jpg

What about ApoB as a metric for CVD? What is ApoB?

ApoB is a marker of atherogenic lipoprotein particles in our bloodstream.

Here's a study from the lancet that shows high levels of ApoB increases risk for CVD and life-span.

They got their data from the UK Biobank and it has approximately 500,000 participants. To verify their hypothesis, they replicated the estimates from the UK Biobank using mendelian-randomization (a type of study that analyzes the genetic predisposition of participants).

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(21)00086-6/fulltext

"In conclusion, our evaluation of apoB using outcomes in first-degree relatives identified that higher apoB is detrimental to lifespan and increases the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Lifestyle and pharmacological approaches to lowering apoB should have widespread beneficial effects, including preventing common diseases and prolonging life."

So how do PUFAs and MUFAs contribute to the lowering of APoB? This is a review done on eighty-seven studies. Here is what they found

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27821191/

"Replacement of carbohydrate by MUFA, not SFA, decreased plasma apoB. Moreover, dietary enriching with n-3 fatty acids [PUFAS] (FA) (from fish: 1·1-1·7 g/d or supplementation: 3·2-3·4 g/d EPA/DHA or 4 g/d EPA), psyllium (about 8-20 g/d), phytosterols (about 2-4 g/d) or nuts (30-75 g/d) also decreased plasma apoB, mostly in hyperlipidaemic subjects"

I'll leave you with some of principles regarding SFA:
- It's a dose-dependent response, dose matters, there's a threshold effect associated with it
- What you replace it with also matters
- Source matters. Fish, dark chocolate, olive oil are high in SFA and the health outcomes are overwhelmingly positive. The same can't be said for something like margarine or butter.

But even that's not to mention saturated fat is surface level. We want to analyze the health effects of foods over the macros and micro.

My goal here is to give others on this forum a more evidentially-based approach to their health that will, in all likelihoods, result in favorable health outcomes based on the evidence that we have.

This brings us back to your anecdote. I have no doubts about how you feel healthier and happier after removing PUFAs from your diet, but how exactly would you know that that was the ONE and ONLY thing that caused you to reverse your eosinophilic esophagitis? What if you have a microbiome that doesn't respond well to fiber, for example?

Point is, the way you're presenting your argument for everyone changing their diet because you got individual gains in a way that can have a multitude of confounding factors and goes against what the overwhelming majority of the studies say is ignorant at best and fatal at worst.

I really think you should approach this topic with more nuance and less absolute certainty. I'll state again: misinformation kills people my friend. What you're doing isn't a favor, it's a disservice.

Edited by toasty7718

"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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@toasty7718Wouldn't like to take you to court. You'd bring so much evidence to back up your case, I would have lost before the trial began. Impressive. So many conflicting things out there on nutrition, we have to be careful of the claims we make while also having an open mind. 


Know thyself....

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@Princess Arabia absolutely.

 

that's why nuance is such an important thing in the realm of data-analyzation :) 


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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5 minutes ago, toasty7718 said:

@Princess Arabia absolutely.

 

that's why nuance is such an important thing in the realm of data-analyzation :) 

You look so much like a little kid in your pic, not saying you are, but seeing all that spewing out from a presumable little kid was astonishingly mind-blowing, even though you were quoting from a lot of studies, doesn't matter.


Know thyself....

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I'd be considered an adult if I was Jewish :D


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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58 minutes ago, toasty7718 said:

If everyone told you that smoking cigarettes was highly addictive and hazardous to your health yet when you smoked a pack a day you felt happier, more clear, more energized, and well-rounded, would you still continue smoking cigarettes despite what the evidence says?

No, because smoking induces the same endogenous oxidation that seed oils do, yet it took decades for that science to actually surface, because the tobacco industry leveraged said "science" to pad their pockets, and the same thing is happening with seed oils. Seed oils are the new smoking and this will be revealed in our lifetime my friend, i.e., similar to how doctors once condoned, advocated even, smoking cigarettes before flipping the script, they will one day reject the seed oil soup that people are slurping on.

But also notice that, unlike my milk, cigarette smoking doesn't make one feel happier, more clear, energized and well-rounded, so you are making a moot point without answering my actual question, which was... "If everyone told you that drinking cow's milk was inflammatory and going to give you acne, and yet, you drank 2 gallons of whole milk every week, had more muscle and strength, less fat, and a better facial complexion than everyone who told you not to drink the milk, would you continue consuming it?" Feel free to actually answer that.

If you were actually serious about getting to the bottom of this issue, you would actually look through the lens that I'm offering by actually doing the diet. Action over intellect. You are intelligent enough to arrive at the truth, but you are looking in all of the wrong places (the paradigm-locked Big Pharma and Big Food-funded studies that keep you in their echo chamber).

1 hour ago, toasty7718 said:

I really think you should approach this topic with more nuance and less absolute certainty. I'll state again: misinformation kills people my friend. What you're doing isn't a favor, it's a disservice.

You are on the wrong side of this debate my friend, and eventually this will all come out in the wash. The truth about saturated fat and seed oils has been hiding in plain sight for the last century, we just have to disabuse ourselves of the nefarious narrative that we've been spoon fed for so many decades of delusion. 

I was once in your position and held similar beliefs, and as such, I will never knock you for clinging to them.

When the nutritional truths do ultimately surface regarding this back and forth we're having, I won't be jumping for joy out of vindication, I will simply hope that you have the humility to embrace the essence of actuality. If you ever want to take this issue seriously, my advice would be to actually field test it for yourself, instead of going the rest of your life and wondering what you may be missing out on.

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2 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

You are on the wrong side of this debate my friend, and eventually this will all come out in the wash. The truth about saturated fat and seed oils has been hiding in plain sight for the last century, we just have to disabuse ourselves of the nefarious narrative that we've been spoon fed for so many decades of delusion. 

I

I will say this again Jason. I won't believe what you say until you provide better evidence than "it makes me feel good." 
 

the people on this forum are also smarter than that. 

Edited by toasty7718

"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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13 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

I will say this again Jason. I won't believe what you say until you provide better evidence than "it makes me feel good." 
 

the people on this forum are also smarter than that. 

What kind of evidence are you seeking? Have you been through a doctoral degree program and learned how to scrutinize scholarly articles? I could provide you a landslide of studies, but they necessitate a nuanced lens to view them through to elucidate the actual truths they offer. Several differing conclusions can be arrived at from any given data cluster, our objective is to solidify an understanding that reconciles everything, without room for paradoxes, i.e., asserting that the Maasai are cut from a different cloth because they have sky high saturated fat intake without evidence of heart disease.

Studies are simply a collection of dots, and the authors of said studies do their best to connect them in a cogent fashion. One must see not merely the way the authors of a study connect the dots, but too, how seemingly disparate dots can be connected that actually renders a self-consistent picture.

You are quite intelligent and I am confident that you will arrive at the truth in good time.

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5 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

but they necessitate a nuanced lens to view them through to elucidate the actual truths they offer.

Yes, I would agree with the fact that interpretation and extrapolation of scientific data is a major source of where disagreement and argument in the field of medicine, but could you provide me of an example of how you view studies through a "nuanced" lens? I think that would clear up the air some because, aside from the health effects you got from the diet you're on now, it would give me some insight into why you came to the conclusions you did.

 

5 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

Several differing conclusions can be arrived at from any given data cluster, our objective is to solidify an understanding that reconciles everything, without room for paradoxes, i.e., asserting that the Maasai are cut from a different cloth because they have sky high saturated fat intake without evidence of heart disease.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. I would assume you're using this as an argument to as to why saturated fat doesn't actually contribute to CVD and the studies done on it are correlational, right?

Using this type of wishful thinking to justify a preconceived notion for a dietary pattern is a sophisticaed form of mental gymnastics and has no bearing for people who actually want accurate data to influence choices about their health.

Don't just take my word for it, here's an epidemiological study examining just that by some researchers from Oxford.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/95/1/26/167903?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

"The hearts and aortae of 50 Masai men were collected at autopsy. These pastoral people are exceptionally active and fit and they consume diets of milk and meat. The intake of animal fat exceeds that of American men. Measurements of the aorta showed extensive atherosclerosis with lipid infiltration and fibrous changes but very few complicated lesions. The coronary arteries showed intimal thickening by atherosclerosis which equaled that of old U.S. men. The Maasai vessels enlarge with age to more than compensate for this disease. It is speculated that the Maasai are protected from their atherosclerosis by physical fitness which causes their coronary vessels to be capacious."

The fact that Maasai don't seem to develop heart disease despite their high saturated fat intake can be explained by the multitude of confounding factors, such as their remarkably high physical fitness levels, infant mortality rates that exceed over 50%, enviornment, etc..

If you were to take a group of infants and kill the weakest half of them and only selected for the most physically fit and capable and raised them their whole lives getting 8+ hours of extensive physical activity everyday, then of course you wouldn't see the same trends of death and disease develop. Promoting an ancestral diet high in SFA because the Maasai don't die of heart disease is inadvertently promoting infanticide if you want to see the similar results they do.

This phenomenon is known as survivorship bias.

Their enviornment shares virtually no resemblance to our modernized and industrial western one, so how would this have any bearing on our choices for optimal health? We have much better data on the relationship between CVD and SFA intake than hunter gatherer populations with survivorship bias.

And as the researches noted, the Maasai of Africa are not immune to atherosclerosis.

5 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

Studies are simply a collection of dots, and the authors of said studies do their best to connect them in a cogent fashion. One must see not merely the way the authors of a study connect the dots, but too, how seemingly disparate dots can be connected that actually renders a self-consistent picture

That's precisely the thing that the world's leading researchers into death, diet, and disease have been doing for the past half-century. Yet all the conclusions they come to seem to be at odds with what you're saying, do they not?

Across the world, the dietary recommendations are all pretty much identical to each other about 95% of the time and they have been for the past half century.
(Side note: the 95% is a rough estimate I've heard before so don't take my word on it exactly)

Here's an example of such:
1. Eat a Variety of Foods
2. Maintain Ideal Weight
3. Avoid Too Much Fat, Saturated Fat, and Cholesterol
4. Eat Foods with Adequate Starch and Fiber
5. Avoid Too Much Sugar
6. Avoid Too Much Sodium
7. If You Drink Alcohol, Do So in Moderation

Pretty sound advice, right? Most health experts would agree with this advice, even despite the fact that these were the dietary guidelines from 1980 (43 years ago)

https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/about-dietary-guidelines/previous-editions/1980-dietary-guidelines-americans

Point is - people who have been studying nutrition throughout their whole academic and medical careers near universally come to the same conclusions, and they've been doing so since longer than most of us have been alive. I'm curious to know what makes the way in which you interpret studies in a "nuanced lens" is somehow the better way and renders all the doctors, professionals, and health-experts wrong.

Also - how would the interpretation of these studies be nuanced if you're using personal anecdotes and experiences intermingled with it? That's not to say that personal experience is not important in the slightest, but that does render your viewpoint very biased given how your own experience differs drastically from what the studies say?

And again, you never actually answered my question regarding how you know with absolute certainty that cutting out PUFAs cured your autism and chronic diseases and this is the ONLY way to do so. How do you take into account other factors, like a possible allergy / intolerance to foods or nutrients found in those foods, like fiber?

I'd be more than happy to provide you with resources about fiber intolerance and how to cure it. It's actually a very common occurrence among those who adopt a carnivore-style diet to have some form of messed up gut microbiome or a lacking of a specific type of amino acid, for example, and when they cut this out they feel better and more energized.

This food intolerance or fucked up gut microbiome can be cured by working with a skilled healthcare practitioner and has been demonstrated repeatedly through a multitude of studies, but that's a topic for another time :)

You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts my friend.

 

Edited by toasty7718

"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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19 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Here's an example of such:
1. Eat a Variety of Foods
2. Maintain Ideal Weight
3. Avoid Too Much Fat, Saturated Fat, and Cholesterol
4. Eat Foods with Adequate Starch and Fiber
5. Avoid Too Much Sugar
6. Avoid Too Much Sodium
7. If You Drink Alcohol, Do So in Moderation

1. As long as the foods you do consume ensure micronutrient sufficiency, (I eat the same handful of things every single day) so it's not variety, per say, but rather, ensuring the nutritional bases have been covered. "Variety" is just a term thrown out into the ether for the average Joe and his family.

2. Yes, but body composition is more important (my BMI is 26, i.e., "overweight" but my body fat percentage is nearly single digit).

3. This is based on a colossal misunderstanding of cardiovascular disease etiology.

4. I consume less than 5 grams of fiber per day (trace amounts from basmati rice). Fiber is helpful for folks have have horrific diets of processed, packaged foods, no doubt, but not if you are eating actual food.

5. Yes, specifically combined fructose/galactose intake from any/all sources should not exceed 50g per day for sedentary folks, and 100g per day for active individuals.

6. Not as important as folks think, you can safely salt to taste. I consume 2 grams per day of sodium and 4-6 grams of potassium.

7. Great advice, I personally prefer zero alcohol and smoking as a hard stop personal standard, but the dose definitely determines the poison.

20 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

And as the researches noted, the Maasai of Africa are not immune to atherosclerosis.

That's a great point actually, and that is right, they are not at all immune to atherosclerosis. While the Maasai are wise to consume a high saturated, low polyunsaturated fat diet, they are severely lacking in antioxidants because they do not consume any fruits or vegetables. What causes cardiovascular disease is not native LDL, but rather, oxidized LDL. This is why, neither the carnivores, nor the plant-based or vegan communities are truly optimized. The optimal omnivore embraces the protection from oxidative stress that saturated fat confers, while also emphasizing the augmentation of his/her own antioxidant status. This is why I would never advise someone to go full blown keto/carnivore, i.e., because they would not be allowed to incorporate the best defense of all, things like 100% pomegranate juice, wild blueberries, and very dark chocolate. Where the Maasai go wrong is that they don't have any such sources of these antioxidants, and they consume a lot of iron-rich blood which is pro oxidative.

20 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Also - how would the interpretation of these studies be nuanced if you're using personal anecdotes and experiences intermingled with it?

It's not intermingled because my anecdotes came after the interpretation was performed. I was EXTREMELY fortunate enough to cross paths with a nutritional savant from Australia in 2015. It was that year that I was given the information I am offering you all. This savant named Luke, at the age of 12, tragically lost his maternal grandmother to a sudden heart attack, and he, thereafter, obsessively ruminated about how and why that could ever happen. He devoted this time in his childhood developing a robust, bottoms up nutritional mental model that reconciles absolutely every study and observation available, and he shared this information with me that I then applied and am benefiting from to this day. Luke has been sitting on this mental model for 24 years now, and I am doing my best to disseminate it on his behalf.

20 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Yes, I would agree with the fact that interpretation and extrapolation of scientific data is a major source of where disagreement and argument in the field of medicine, but could you provide me of an example of how you view studies through a "nuanced" lens?

The scientific literature supporting the notion that we should be replacing saturated fats with poly fats was conducted at a time in which this belief was already indoctrinated into the minds of the people being studied. This means that the people who tend to consume more saturated fat will, on average, engage in the behaviors that precisely protect them from atherosclerosis (things to help fight endogenous oxidation, such as consuming more fruits/vegetables and exercising more).

The obsession with saturated fat is derived from the fact that it tends to increase circulating LDL, whereas polyunsaturated fats tend to decrease circulating LDL (because they are hepatotoxic). It is the misunderstanding of heart disease etiology that has kept this obsession alive and well to this day.

LDL is not the boogeyman it was once believed to be, and this is why the goal post keeps shifting for the target we strive for, and it will continue to shift forever lower until we realize that we are optimizing for the wrong metric (if it were the true target, it wouldn't need to be adjusted downward). You don't want to optimize for a reduction in LDL, but rather, you want to optimize for resistance to LDL oxidation, meaning, you not only want a high saturated to polyunsaturated fat intake ratio, but you also want the fruits and vegetables necessary to upregulate your antioxidant status.

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7 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

4. I consume less than 5 grams of fiber per day (trace amounts from basmati rice). Fiber is helpful for folks have have horrific diets of processed, packaged foods, no doubt, but not if you are eating actual food.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you provide a proposition to this statement?


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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7 hours ago, Jason Actualization said:

The obsession with saturated fat is derived from the fact that it tends to increase circulating LDL, whereas polyunsaturated fats tend to decrease circulating LDL (because they are hepatotoxic). It is the misunderstanding of heart disease etiology that has kept this obsession alive and well to this day.

You still haven't given me any evidence for this proposition :)


"It is from my open heart that I will mirror you, and reflect back to you all that you are:

As a being of love, of energy, 

of passion, and truth."

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