General reminder that nutrition 'science' is mostly paid for by corporations (see "sugar is better than fat") and the whole Ancel Keys 'Seven Countries Study' (cherry picked from 20+ countries) debacle and needs very careful handling.

If you want to get useful information on nutrition, I recommend immediately disregarding anything from Harvard, do your own research, but I've found it significantly corrupt and biased towards the second largest US export (AgTech) after guns.

FWIW this comes from the perspective of someone trained in hard science (Phys/Math) who then did advanced (published) work in BioInformatics (learning the complexities of Bio) and then looked at nutrition, what a shitshow !

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I have lots of biases in the area the paper is talking about. I've acquired the actual paper and on first pass they don't define what low carb means... really, they don't, anywhere... including the supplemental material. Making best effort inferences on how they make the category cohorts, it seems 40% of energy from carbs is the cutoff. 40% of a 1800 calorie diet is about 200g of carbs per day.

Currently my smells on this paper

Who : Harvard nutrition, a org with a history of heavy plant based bias
What they said : PBF beats ABF in a 200g "low carb" diet using intermediate health metrics
On the basis of what : Epidemiology, on food frequency questionaries, using major assume corrective factors
In what context : 200g/day carb diet, not controlling for processed foods (so healthy user bias the unprocessed abf group isn't represented at all)... they explicitly say this paper doesn't apply to keto "evidence from our study regarding the LCD and LFD patterns cannot be directly generalized to diets with much lower carbohydrates or fats intake, such as the ketogenic diet."

The bias is really evident in that they defined healthy and unhealthy LCD in terms of animal products... that is presupposing the outcomes in their healthy fat ranking system!

When I have more time I'll do a full post on this paper after I've had time to read it and figure out what the actual data is. I'm gobsmacked a paper on low carb doesn't even define what % of carbs is low carb explicitly... why make that so indirect and hidden!?!??!!

The good news is harvard is finally acknowledging the tsunami of low carb and keto research in their own way, but they are going to do it kicking and screaming on the pbf hill the entire time... but progress is progress.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Cool, I'll look out for the full review. Jeebus 200g/40% is 'low carb', not unexpected, but it's like they don't even try.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 2 days ago

They are trying really hard to do something

It's weird, when the keto and carnivore papers get published they are always open access... but this paper... closed... and doesn't define their categories... it's curious. If i wasn't a charitable man I make think that was intentional.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anson Keys

Ancel Keys

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago

Thanks,