Big butter
March 18, 2018 4:35 PM   Subscribe

"And while it is true, as Yudkin (previously) divulges, that his sugar theory aroused opposition from those who believed saturated fat was the culprit in heart disease, the image of him as a shunned prophet, preaching in the wilderness and hounded by agents of industry, leaves out the extent to which his research was disbelieved mainly because the evidence supporting it did not hold up to scrutiny. High-profile attempts to replicate Yudkin’s signature finding that heart attack sufferers tended to be heavy sugar users flat-out failed. Present-day Yudkin disciples have also looked past the extent to which his research was richly supported by the food industry."

The Slate article's authors wrote in more detail in a (paywalled) article for Science.
posted by clawsoon (36 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
It looks like an author version of the Science article is available here, on researchgate.net.
posted by clawsoon at 4:44 PM on March 18, 2018


Well, I guess I'll just never eat anything again.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:56 PM on March 18, 2018 [12 favorites]


Well, I guess I'll just never eat anything again.

That is one way to prevent heart disease.
posted by clawsoon at 4:58 PM on March 18, 2018 [16 favorites]


I like big butter and I can not lie...
posted by Dip Flash at 5:00 PM on March 18, 2018 [17 favorites]


A key quote from the Science article, about one of the scientists who was accused of being bought out by the sugar industry:
Written by committee staff but edited mainly by Hegsted, the Dietary Goals did not, however, overlook sugar. Taking note of sugar’s link with tooth decay and possibly diabetes, the report recommended a 40% reduction in sugar intake.
posted by clawsoon at 5:07 PM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sugar: “Fat!”
Fat: “Sugar!”
Sugar: “FAT!”
Fat: “SUGAR!”

SALT crouches behind houseplant, stifling laughter
posted by Sys Rq at 5:09 PM on March 18, 2018 [52 favorites]


http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/abstract

If this major study published in the Lancet a few months ago is correct, then perhaps the only issue is that he focused on sugars instead of carbohydrates as a whole? They reviewed ~5800 deaths from 18 countries, and found that:

High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.
posted by prosopagnosia at 5:21 PM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Joe Jackson said it best 35 years ago...
Everything
Everything gives you cancer (cha cha cha)

posted by oneswellfoop at 5:35 PM on March 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


So, one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, huh?
posted by indubitable at 6:10 PM on March 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Everything
Everything gives you cancer (cha cha cha)


Half the things give you cancer.
The other half of things poisons you.
So you have to get the balance as close to right as you can so the poison kills the cancer quick but you slower.
posted by srboisvert at 7:40 PM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


> That is one way to prevent heart disease.

Not necessarily, sudden cardiac death takes a lot of people with anorexia nervosa.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 8:30 PM on March 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


Marion Nestle, a renowned nutrition professor
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:14 PM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


> we believe that the real enemies in modern nutrition are hyperbole and oversimplification.

Hyperbole and oversimplification are so insidious too, because they put them in everything. Have you gone to the grocery store and tried to buy tomato sauce without hyperbole in it? And the amount of oversimplification in a typical fast food meal is staggering. Steering clear of these two ingredients in our modern food system is almost a full time job, and that’s if you don’t live in a food desert!
posted by chrchr at 9:15 PM on March 18, 2018 [25 favorites]


Interesting read. And though I know the article warns agains the temptation of seductive '...narratives about industry meddling in scientific research' to explain 'twists and turns in science and policy', I can't help but be reminded of the clash within the sugar industry (corn vs cane) that swept the US a few years back. As far as I can tell the sudden and very prominent backlash against HFCS had everything to do with trade negotiations, marketing, and agricultural policy. The dominant narrative that actually drove public awareness (which positioned cane sugar as a healthy alternative to corn syrup) was supported by very thin evidence (one small study on mice), and obscured the fact that the two are almost identical in composition and effect on the body. The whole affair was a big win for Brazil (largest exporter of sugar in the world, by far) and companies that could put 'No High Fructose Corn Syrup' on their product's packaging. I'm sure that whatever went on behind the scenes there would make a fascinating story (or maybe I'm just addicted to the sweet taste of 'conspiratorial tales', even 'when not grounded in strong evidence').
posted by soy bean at 10:14 PM on March 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


A lot of research into nutrition and food science is heavily funded by the industry. I am discovering in my quest to get into graduate school in food science that it's pretty rare for grad students to not be fully funded and that money comes from industry. I don't think it so much influences the results, it influences what questions get asked in the first place. Problems the industry is interested in researching get funded.
posted by Foam Pants at 11:00 PM on March 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


Sugar: “Fat!”
Fat: “Sugar!”


I swear I once saw a pile of single-serving packs of sugar that were labeled:
____SUGAR_____
CONTAINS NO FAT
posted by straight at 12:31 AM on March 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


When I have the option, these days I just eat nutritionists.
posted by delfin at 3:40 AM on March 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


The story is more about the construction of narratives about science than it is about specific nutritional recommendations. Yudkin was paid as handsomely by the dairy industry (half a million a year in today's money) as Hegsted was by non-dairy industries, but the story we've been told recently was that Yudkin was a brave independent fighting corrupt science while Hegsted was a tool of Big Sugar. The both took a lot of money from industry, and they both thought of themselves as independent scientists. Hegsted was better at sticking to the available data, no matter what his funders might think, while Yudkin had an intuition that wasn't well-supported by data at the time but has gotten more evidence-based support in the decades since.

But since specific nutritional recommendations have come up in the discussion... :-)

prosopagnosia: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/abstract

As they point out in the study, most of the increased mortality risk from carbohydrates found by the study comes from including poor people in poor countries who are getting most of their calories from bread and rice. The death rates hockey-stick up when calories-from-carbs gets to 60-70% or so:
It is also noteworthy that the spline plots showed a non-linear increasing trend in total mortality with a carbohydrate intake and the rise seems to occur among those who consumed more than 60% of energy from carbohydrate....
That's an uncommon developed world diet unless you're desperately poor or you grew up desperately poor or you've got so much money stress in your life that you're effectively desperately poor even if that's not reflected in the official income that's being adjusted for. Back in the flat handle of the hockey stick where most of us in the developed world are at,
the absence of association between low carbohydrate intake (eg, <50% of energy) and health outcomes does not provide support for very low carbohydrate diets.
Part of the point of the study seems to be that it's not a great idea to apply health policy recommendations to poor people in poor countries that were developed by studying rich people in rich countries:
Moreover, many studies that report higher risk of coronary heart disease deaths with higher saturated fatty acid intake were from North American and European populations (with relatively high intakes of total and saturated fats) where in the past cardiovascular disease was the major cause of deaths and their applicability to other populations is uncertain. ... [R]ecommending lowering carbohydrate might be particularly applicable to [low-income and middle-income countries] if replacement foods from fats and protein are available and affordable.
Even though they did their best to adjust for socioeconomic status, I find it hard to escape the idea that what they found was that being so poor that you have to mostly eat bread or rice is bad for your health.
posted by clawsoon at 3:58 AM on March 19, 2018 [13 favorites]


I was curious where I fit, so I put together a spreadsheet of my typical daily food intake. Result:

Fat: 103g x 9Cal/g = 927Cal
Carbs: 223g x 4Cal/g = 892Cal
Protein: 110g x 4Cal/g = 440Cal

So about 40% fat, 40% carbs, and 20% protein. I should probably cut back a bit on the fat, especially the saturated fat.
posted by clawsoon at 4:08 AM on March 19, 2018


(Sorry to keep self-posting: In the Lancet study, I notice that they made the curious choice to use cubic splines to create their graphs, which gives some extra wiggle that isn't present in the data. The tables - by macronutrient and by fat type - appear to be more accurate than the graphs.)
posted by clawsoon at 5:52 AM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Marion Nestle, a renowned nutrition professor

Halloween Jack, I don't get it?
posted by a fiendish thingy at 5:56 AM on March 19, 2018


I'm still a believer in the Michael Pollan mantra, even if I don't practice it as much as I should:

Eat Food (as in prioritize unprocessed, natural foods over processed products), Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

Beyond that, I ignore the Big Food Trends as much as I can because I know that they will change and that hyperfocusing on one specific food or food group is dangerous. Every ten years or so, the prevailing wisdom that Food A is Super-Healthy, Food B is Worse Than We Used To Think and Food C will give you Cancer of the Everything gets shuffled and A, B and C trade places. Are eggs healthy or lethal? Are sugars or fats Satan's little helpers? What happens if I eat nothing but oat bran for a week? (I sit on the can for the following week, that's what.)

This is not to suggest that all foods are neutral and no suggestions are valid. The response to "bacon and candy bars and alfredo sauce and sodas and 95% of the menu at Applebee's are bad for you" should be "well, duh." But all things in moderation, not Shun Shun Shun.

Halloween Jack, I don't get it?

The emphasis was on the word Nestle, which is also the name of a megacorp that would dearly love the answer to "what should people eat at all stages of life" to be "what we sell them."
posted by delfin at 6:00 AM on March 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't think it so much influences the results, it influences what questions get asked in the first place. Problems the industry is interested in researching get funded.

There's also good evidence from pharmaceutical research that publication bias, the failure to publish trials that don't get the results you want (this old blog post of Ben Goldacre talks about it, but the whole movement for registration of all trials is an attempt to curb it) is a major problem which is exacerbated by industry funding. People very rarely fake their data, but the suppression of disappointing results is still pretty much par for the course.
posted by howfar at 6:25 AM on March 19, 2018


The emphasis was on the word Nestle, which is also the name of a megacorp that would dearly love the answer to "what should people eat at all stages of life" to be "what we sell them.

Ah, got it. I blanked because I've worked with her a few times, and her name is pronounced like the word, as in "I love it when the baby birds nestle into their mother's wing", not the corporation Nestlé.

(Plus you left out Nestlé's multiple human rights violations, and their belief that corporations should be allowed to own water sources, and that time they killed hundreds of infants in Africa by dressing their sales reps up like nurses and convincing mothers that breastfeeding was bad, then leaving them to use Nestlé-brand formula with unsafe water sources! Their brand of predatory capitalism is so much worse than their normal marketing!)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:29 AM on March 19, 2018 [9 favorites]


When I have the option, these days I just eat nutritionists.

That's disgusting. Most of the nutritionists I've met were heavy smokers who ate garbage.
posted by loquacious at 8:21 AM on March 19, 2018


I tend to look to the cuisines of countries where people live long, healthy lives, and try to eat what they eat.
posted by sonascope at 8:22 AM on March 19, 2018


The dominant narrative that actually drove public awareness (which positioned cane sugar as a healthy alternative to corn syrup) was supported by very thin evidence (one small study on mice), and obscured the fact that the two are almost identical in composition and effect on the body.

That's really not true. Sucrose is one fructose and one glucose, while fructose is just fructose. Your body metabolizes glucose well throughout the body and gets the most ATP (i.e., energy) from it. Glucose metabolism is especially important in your brain. Your metabolism of fructose occurs primarily in the liver and isn't as efficient, so you get less ATP. Wikipedia walks you through the complete biochemical differences in metabolism for those who like such things.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:24 AM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


The thing is, High Fructose Corn Syrup isn't just fructose. It's higher in fructose than unprocessed corn syrup, which is almost all glucose. Most of what's used is HFCS 42 and HFCS 55, which are 42% and 55% fructose, respectively. If you want to argue that HFCS is worse for you than sucrose, go for it. But don't do it based on a false claim that ignores the 45–58% of the content of HFCS that is glucose in order to make it sound more different from sucrose than it is.
posted by JiBB at 10:49 AM on March 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


My three-year-old son loves butter, and whenever I give him a piece of toast, a waffle, or a pancake, he says "I want that HUGE chunk of butter!"

We're a butter family.
posted by jjwiseman at 11:27 AM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sucrose is one fructose and one glucose, while fructose is just fructose.

Well, yeah. JiBB already explained why this is a very misleading way to frame the differences between HFCS and cane sugar. If you actually want to cut down on your fructose intake, you should be looking for products made with corn syrup (or even HFCS 42), not sucrose.

I totally get where you are coming from, though. If you'd asked me about HFCS a few years ago, I would have said basically the same thing. That we all believe this is what's fascinating to me.

My current understanding is that cane sugar and HFCS are bad for you, when ingested in the high quantities typical of American diets, in almost exactly the same way. Here's a Nature article and a FAQ from the FDA for more info on the health effects of the two sweeteners. I'm certainly open to the idea that there are differences between how we metabolize each that could lead to different health outcomes, but the only evidence supporting this idea I can find is the deeply flawed/limited Princeton study on rats that gets cited all the time.

The environmental and social impacts of corn/cane industrial production surely differ; and the artificially deflated cost of HFCS in the US certainly make it cheaper for companies to pump more of the stuff into our food supply. But those weren't big themes in the public debate.

To try to bring this back to the OP; I guess I'm wondering what caused the very public (and deeply misinformed) backlash against HFCS that happened in the early-mid 2000s, exemplified in articles like this HuffPo piece . Did a grassroots movement based in the anti-science, conspiracy minded thinking that the OP warns against get co-opted by corporate marketing teams? Or did a deliberate propaganda campaign, waged in the interests of massive multi-nationals, manage to successfully convince American consumers that simply switching to a different sweetener (while maintaining or even increasing the dose) made sugary products healthier? I lean towards the latter but maybe it's a bit of both.
posted by soy bean at 3:54 PM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Sorry, I thought I was responding to a claim that fructose and sucrose are the same thing. If that was not what was being claimed, then my biochemical metabolism diversion was unnecessary.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:31 PM on March 19, 2018


No worries, and sorry if I capitalized on your confusion to make make point. And the biochem/metabolism angle is potentialy relevant to the difference between HFCS and sucrose, in that glucose and fructose molecules are bonded in sucrose and 'free' in HFCS (which also has a few additional larger sugar molecules). Our bodies break the sucrose bonds very quickly, and there does not appear to be any scientific evidence that this extra metabolic step makes any difference to how our bodies use the two.

Of course, 'Big Sugar' could be suppressing that evidence!
posted by soy bean at 4:58 PM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


But don't do it based on a false claim that ignores the 45–58% of the content of HFCS that is glucose in order to make it sound more different from sucrose than it is.

Regarding that... since sucrose is (by definition) 50-50 glucose and fructose, does the fact that HFCS varies from the exact 50-50 ratio make a significant difference in its nutritional (or anti-nutritional characteristics)? My sense is that it's a minor difference, but I would be interested in seeing any studies about this (as opposed to, e.g., industry spin or hype from "natural foods" nutritionists).
posted by theorique at 10:02 AM on March 20, 2018


So about 40% fat, 40% carbs, and 20% protein. I should probably cut back a bit on the fat, especially the saturated fat.

Why cut back on saturated fat? Emerging results seem to suggest that saturated fat is fine, monounsaturated fat is fine in moderation, and polyunsaturated fat increases cancer risk (although Omega-3 polyunsaturated fat is good to maintain as a small percentage of calories, through dietary sources such as whole, fatty fish).

It seems like in the area of dietary fats, the big threat to health in recent years has been the transition to trans fats and "vegetable" oils (i.e. cheap seed oils like soybean or corn oil that are extracted via high heat and/or chemical processes).
posted by theorique at 10:26 AM on March 20, 2018


I would be interested in seeing any studies about this

Me too. The one I referenced earlier, which got a lot of media hype, was this one from a group at Princeton (locked behind academic wall, pm me for more info) . It's pretty weak IMHO. The main take away is that if you provide a rat with 24 hour access to a sugary substance they are going to get fat. The data also seems to indicate that if you provide female rats with a daily 12 hours of unlimited HFCS and 12 hours of unlimited rat chow, they will have gain less weight when compared to female rats with 24 hours of unlimited rat chow access?? And the study sizes seem tiny to me (like 8-10 rats in each group); many of their results are not statistically significant.

Also, honey has similar ratios of fructose to glucose as HFCS and apparently it's the bee's knees. No one is going around slapping 'NO HONEY' stickers on their products or studying how bad it is for you compared to regular sugar.

We haven't even touched on the way HFCS became a major class signifier when it came to food (one of MANY used to segment markets, shame people, etc.). To me the whole thing reeks of exactly the kind of PR shenanigans the OP is telling us to calm down about. So I guess I should calm down a bit and respect the scientific and policy processes.

Sorry if this HFCS stuff is a derail!
posted by soy bean at 3:56 PM on March 20, 2018


No one is going around slapping 'NO HONEY' stickers on their products or studying how bad it is for you compared to regular sugar.

I once took some honey into work for my tea and my clean-eating supplement-pounding coworker noticed. I spent five minutes unsuccessfully trying to get that point across and another five minutes just trying to end the conversation:
"Is that real honey? coz me and my wife bought a jar once and after a while there was like, a whole inch of sugar at the bottom!"
"What? No, that's normal. Honey crystallizes."
"No, it wasn't honey, it was sugar, we took it to an expert and he was like yup, that's sugar!"
"Um, yes, honey is sugar. That's normal."
"What, are you sure? I heard that too much sugar is bad for you so I was trying to cut down on sugar, and I thought I'd try some more natural sweeteners instead."
"Yeah, no, honey is still sugar."
posted by yeahlikethat at 8:36 AM on March 21, 2018


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