zlacker

Avoid oils in general. They're mostly devoid of nutrition (i.e. no fiber, lacking vitamins and minerals compared to the food source) and only contain fat https://youtu.be/LbtwwZP4Yfs

>>spraak+(OP)
Thanks for the link.

This seems mostly in line with what I read in "The Mostly Plant Diet" [1]:

> Fats: Especially avoid trans fats and vegetable (seed) oils, but also other cooking oils, even olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, etc. Enjoy whole olives, whole coconut, whole avocados, whole walnuts, and whole sesame seeds instead. They are naturally packaged with many nutrients and fiber, which is stripped out when processed to make oil.

[1] http://www.humansarenotbroken.com/mostly-plant-diet/

>>spraak+(OP)
spraak's point on preferring whole source foods seems sound.

Having watched this video though, it presents a fringe view on dietary lipids, and is full of dubious logic. The presenter gains academic credos by flashing up various small studies very briefly, but never examines their interpretability, nor considers the counterpoint.

Perhaps there is a larger issues here of vegans over-eating poor quality lipids, which he is trying to address.

>>spraak+(OP)
There is no reason to avoid fat.

Here is one instance of an easily accessible peer-reviewed-science-based list of the current knowledge on dietary fat: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/t/fat

It does not show that oils or fat are something to blanket avoid.

>>spraak+(OP)
Wrong. Quality fats are not only essential but also good for you for example: olive oils, Avocado oils.

Avoid (cheap) vegetable oils such as sunflower and rapeseed oils and the derived products with hydrogenated oils, such as margarines.

>>ensife+L5
He's saying to prefer the whole food (the "source") over the raw oil. Doesn't seem that wrong.

Also, this health guide lists sunflower and "cheap" canola as examples of good unsaturated fats.

>>Anthon+G5
I didn't say to avoid fat, I said to avoid extracted fats (oils). Whole food fats e.g. the olive instead of olive oil is fine

>>spraak+(OP)
There's some evidence that olive oil is directly good for the heart: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/1/44/4564320

>>spraak+(OP)
As someone from Spain, a place that's soon gonna have the highest life expectancy in the world, yeah we're not removing olive oil from about 50% of the "core" dishes that we regularly eat.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...

https://www.oliveoilmarket.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3.p...

>>neurom+h3
I don't have the book at hand right now to cite exact pages, but Dr. Greger's "How Not to Die" has a much better explanation and cited sources

>>Escolt+Pa
I don't have the book at hand right now to cite exact pages, but Dr. Greger's "How Not to Die" has a much better explanation and cited sources on why one would want to avoid oils in favor of the whole plant source. Looking at longevity, it's relative and multifaceted - maybe oils aren't as damaging as not exercising, but it doesn't make them healthy.

>>abainb+ma
That study compares different olive oils, not olive oil vs e.g. whole olives. Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book explains how oils like olive oil are in general not good for the arteries.

>>spraak+(OP)
Replying to my own comment since it's too late to edit:

I don't mean avoid fats, I mean avoid extracted fats. Oils lack fiber and much of the nutrition that the whole food has. I.e. eat olives over olive oil, avocados over avocado oil, etc. I understand it sounds crazy, and yes it's not easy, but for my family's health it's been worth it. We've all found great benefit in different ways.

Also Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book is a better source than the YouTube video I linked.

>>spraak+nb
I'd trust the people consuming them (and living to 100+) over some Dr that looks way older than his 46 years...

(Yeah, it's multifaceted, but it's not true that olive oil is "devoid of nutricional value" as someone wrote above (it has antioxidants, omega-6, oleic acid, and so on).

>>spraak+ia
Olives make a good snack, olive oil doesn't. Olive oil is great for frying things in, whole (or even sliced) olives aren't.

It's silly to pretend that you can pick one and live your life without the other. Or that there is never a need for some sort of cooking fat.

>>latch+68
I wonder now if this Guide is also sponsored by the Agriculture and Health Industry. Processed food and sugar are the real things people should avoid.

>>spraak+(OP)
It doesn't make a blind bit of difference. As long as you're a) not obese, b) not eating too much sugar and b) eating reasonable quantities of vegetables, everything else is a rounding error. Read just about any study on nutrition and you'll see negligible effect sizes at the very cusp of statistical significance.

All of the confusion about what we're supposed to eat derives from this simple fact. We've got all sorts of data suggesting that this diet or this food might be good for you, but the effect sizes are too small to care about.

If you obsessively tweak your diet based on every little scrap of data, you might possibly earn yourself three or four months of healthy life expectancy compared to a diet that your great-grandmother would recognise as being sensible. It's just not worth the effort.

>>Escolt+Pa
If Spain has the best diet why did it take this long to rise up in the rankings?

>>spraak+ia
About a year ago, I started looking into current nutritional advice. One thing that stood out was that the average American used to get 40% of their calories from fat and 1/6 of Americans were obese. The government recommended reducing fat to less than 30% of overall calories, and, amazingly, Americans actually followed the recommendation. We now get about 30% of our calories from fat, and 1/3 of us are obese.

That doesn’t say much about what kind of fat we’re eating (e.g., if it’s oil), but the advice to reduce calories from fat was based on them being empty calories. It appears that they also help people feel full longer.

Personally, when I eat a salad for lunch, it doesn’t bother me that literally 85% of the calories come from fat (15 calories for the lettuce, 90 calories for the salad dressing). Even if I have low-fat salad dressing (30 calories), I’m getting 66% of my calories from fat.

Then again , maybe I’m reading the data wrong: it’s possible to reduce the percentage of calories coming from fat by eating the same amount of fat, and more food overall. Maybe Americans just did that.

>>_up+0i
It sounds like Canada’s guide followed the same path that the US’s did: the original USDA food pyramid was influenced by lobbying and recommended lots of carbohydrates and milk. It also suffered from the fact that there was no attempt to have people follow the diet to see its effects before the USDA recommended it to the whole country. Over the past twenty years, the USDA has quietly been revising the recommendations (they make a big deal when they issue new recommendations and websites to distribute them, but they don’t say much about what actually changed each time).

My favorite example is that a doctor once recommended that I follow the DASH diet to lower my blood pressure. The DASH diet was a modified version of the 1990s food pyramid. A relatively recent study compared it with diets that get fewer calories from carbohydrates, and while all the diets they tried did lower blood pressure, the original DASH diet was the worst of the bunch ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3236092/ ).

>>spraak+nb
Funny thing is that Dr. Valter Longo suggests the exact opposite - a take-in of 80 grams of olive oil a day: https://valterlongo.com/cardiovascular-diseases/

I read both books - "How not to die" (Greger) and "the Longevity Diet" - and I thought about their opinions as well. ATM I tend to stick to good oils from plants as well as nuts. Greger is not very convincing - mostly because he suggests nuts as well, and a good produced oil (like extra virgine olive oil) does not loose much nutritional value. I don't care about reduced antioxidants in oil if I combine it with greens that have loads of them.

>>tom_me+Hf
Because you're assuming maintaining the same eating habits. I have literally consumed no overt oils for a year now, have had no need for a cooking fat, and have had no lack in creative dishes. I eat flavorful curries, soups, etc. If I want something similar to sauted, I can use water or broth. If I want something crispy, I can bake. You just lack creative imagination to see that it's possible.

>>coldte+Ie
You know that's fallacious logic, right? Olive oil is devoid of value in comparison to olives. It has no fiber and stripped of minerals and vitamins.

>>Helene+JJ
How does recommending nuts contradict his message? It doesn't.

>>spraak+E01
We're talking about oil here. Where do the olives come in? When I want oil in my cooking it is for what it tastes, and what recipes it affords.

If I want to fry with oil or put dressing in my salad, another oil might do the trick: olives are irrelevant. Might as well have compared olive oil to a broccoli or almonds...

The fact that it has "no fiber" is also irrelevant as to whether it has nutritional value (fibers are not digested anyway, and I'm not looking into oil for fibers in the first place).

>>spraak+ia
As dietary advice is being presented here as explicit statements (incidentally without evidence) I want to make this claim: The advice to avoid extracted fats (oils) is not sound.

As categories, oils and fat are fine. They both contain elements which are good for health. There are subcategories which seem to be bad for health (e.g. trans fats, and oils with those in, or rancid oil).

>>spraak+R01
His message is that you should not eat oils because their nutritional value has been decreased in the process. He does not meditate about the different fat acids and their functions. In my opinion, he is missing out that there are nuts and oils that are quite similar in their fat composition. Of course, nuts have proteins and carbohydrates (mostly sugar) as well. But what he forgets is that you won't eat olive oil alone - you'll most likely have it with a good amount of greens, tomatoes or whatever.

Just have a look at the study he mentions when he's talking about the impairment of artery functions after eating olive oil: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/clc.49602214...

Quote: "This impairment, however, was also totally eliminated when vitamins C and E were given. As with antioxidant vitamin supplementation, olive oil, eaten with vinegar on a salad, did not impair endothelial function. Some societies that use the Mediterranean diet may have learned to provide the natural antioxidants which buffer the oxidative stress of these fatty meals."

He totally eliminated this aspect so he can ban the oils. Another discussion here on HN blamed him for cherrypicking studies. I'm not sure if that's wrong. He has some good advice in general but for this aspect, I don't really trust him.

>>coldte+p31
You really are ignorant to the importance of fiber, then, and the negative health effects of consuming a substance without fiber (sugar over a fruit, analogous to cocaine over coca leaf). Fiber is incredibly beneficial to our microbiome and it's a debunked myth that it's not digested - bacteria in the colon consume it and make essential fatty acids, as an example.

I don't look to get fiber from olive oil, I look to get whole plant foods with fiber in my diet. I also want to avoid the negative arterial effects from extracted fats.

There is no physiological need for oil, only culinary. I have changed my cooking habits in light of this and I continue to eat highly flavorful and creative dishes.

>>Anthon+741
There's no physiological need for oil. Fat, yes. Oil is purely culinary.

>>atomic+qu
Diet is not everything in the equation and we already have the highest life expectancy in Europe, so we're already "high enough". Also things like eliminating pollution from especially cities have become hot topics recently and that's also helped and etc..

My claim specifically, was that I find it rather surprising that olive oil is unhealthy, when the soon to be country with the highest life expectancy in the world, consumes per person 10 kg of it every year.

>>Escolt+be1
I think everyone wants to live the longest possible and not long enough as considered by someone else. Maybe people in Spain would live even longer without olive oil?

Also, consider that over 50% of the adult population in Spain is overweight. Maybe less oil would improve issues that come from being overweight and obese.

Plus, leading cause of death in Spain is heart disease.

>>atomic+kp1
Yeah right but the obesity increase is mostly correlated all around the world and here with the increased consumption of "junk food", i.e. highly processed and very high in sugar, not with olive oil consumption, so...

>>atomic+kp1
Thank you, this was nearly exactly what I was going to reply

>>Escolt+Ky1
But supposedly these Spaniards are consuming oil and not sugar. Perhaps they need to drink it!

>>atomic+i92
They already did. Valter Longo cited studies with an average intake of 1 litre a day. Gist is, it was quite good for them.

>>spraak+Ub
Dr Greger's claims seem to contradict the bulk of academic opinion. Maybe he's right, but when I search, I tend to find things like these:

"Olive oil is well known for its cardioprotective properties" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23006416

"In conclusion, the aggregated evidence supports the assertion that olive oil consumption is beneficial for human health" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037851221...

"In conclusion, olive oil consumption was related to a reduced risk of incident CHD events." - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

"Higher baseline total olive oil consumption was associated with 48% (HR: 0.52; 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.93) reduced risk of cardiovascular mortality" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030221/

"In this experiment, it seems that taking 20ml of raw olive oil – either extra virgin or ‘normal’ – can have a positive effect on our hearts." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/tWtLcz30LZm3YTk5Vf...