Contributors

Friday, March 21, 2014

Eat As Many Cheeseburgers As You Want?

The good thing about science is that it's true whether you believe it or not and now that this study is out, I'm waiting for the health nuts of the world to blow a massive bowel.

The new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil. “My take on this would be that it’s not saturated fat that we should worry about” in our diets, said Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, the lead author of the new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of public health and primary care at Cambridge University.

It's never been one particular ingredient but several of them combined with each person's unique genetic code. Honestly, it's this code that really dictates what sort of illnesses and longevity we will have.

2 comments:

Nikto said...

Come on, Mark. "Eat as many cheeseburgers as you want?" The report says absolutely nothing of the sort.

Excess calories cause weight gain, no matter their source. Certain metabolisms will experience more weight gain when consuming carbohydrates, others will gain more weight when consuming fats. Depending on your exercise level, you may in fact need to consume more carbohydrates than someone who is sedentary.

But the key point is that everyone gains weight when they consume more calories than they burn.

There are other reasons why eating steak and hamburgers is bad. All saturated fats are not equal. As the article you linked to mentions, diets that include nuts, fish, high-fiber grains, and olive oil are linked with fewer heart attacks and strokes.

So, yeah, not all fats are bad: we already knew that. But nothing in this report contradicts the fact that a steady diet of cheeseburgers and fries will significantly shorten the average person's lifespan, mostly because of weight gain: that double quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries, apple pie and 32-ounce coke have 1860 calories (from CalorieLab).

Juris Imprudent said...

What Nikto - you expect M to actually comprehend the articles he links to?