Comment on PROTEIN BRO

• SeaUrchinHorizon@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  False. Here’s a short 4 minute video with several referenced studies by a renowned lifestyle medicine doctor debunking this myth: Does Dietary Cholesterol (Eggs) Raise Blood Cholesterol?. TL;DR: Even 90% of egg industry funded studies show eggs raise cholesterol.

  I also wrote the below, on how bad studies funded by industry interests can be cherrypicked by journalists who want to conclude “<unhealthy food> is healthy, actually” such that these myths arise in the first place. I explored this particular example of “dietary cholesterol is good” by scrutinizing the first PubMed study I found on the subject, as an example of what to look for in good study design.

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  Saying that dietary cholesterol is good is factually insane, eating dietary cholesterol absolutely raises your cholesterol. However, it’s common to hold these false narratives about nutrition. The issue is that it’s incredibly easy to create a faulty study design if you go in trying to prove “eggs are healthy,” for instance. Take, for example, the egg industry, which has something to gain by convincing people that the massively high cholesterol in eggs isn’t bad for you, and oftentimes funds these biased study designs.

  What does a biased study look like?

  • Some examples of biased study design is taking 20 year olds, having them healthy salads vs massive steaks for lunch, then checking back and saying “none of them have heart disease, so steak is healthy” (because they’re 20, the age cohort was too young to be drawing those conclusions).
  • Read a study that compared the intelligence of kids in Africa who got “meat” via an actual meal or “vegetables” via giving them straight vegetable oil (obviously unhealthy); the vegetable oil group still won despite the handicap. Aka choosing to compare something that is unhealthy with also unhealthy alternatives so you can say there was no difference -Even the traditional “a bit of wine is healthy in moderation” bit came from faulty studies which grouped “people who had to quit drinking after developing liver disease” with “people who have never drunk a single drop” in the “never drinkers” category, which made it appear as if drinking no wine was somehow less healthy than drinking some wine.

  What does an unbiased study look like? The best study design, imo, is a meta-analysis of several randomized double-blind placebo-controlled intervention studies.

  • Randomized = people assigned to the control vs the experimental group randomly
  • Double-blind = both the researcher and the subject don’t know whether they’re giving/getting the placebo or the experimental (otherwise the researcher’s expectations can influence the subject to behave in a certain way)
  • Placebo-controlled = giving a sugar pill with no medication control alongside an actual medicine pill, because oftentimes just the act of taking a pill can make people report less pain, that they feel healthier, happier, etc etc etc. In nutrition studies the equivalent of this may be giving tasteless supplements, shakes or muffins made with or without the ingredient to be tested, etc
  • Intervention study = A study where you give group 1 thing A, group 2 thing B, and group 3 a control

  In this case, I’m assuming you’re getting this false information from studies like this Dietary Cholesterol and the Lack of Evidence in Cardiovascular Disease which right off the bat raises red flags due to being written by a single author, saying ‘eggz are helthy,’ the funding section only being funded by some unnamed “institutional startup,” and finally only being a literature review (very easy to cherry pick bad data), not an intervention study of it’s own

  One of the studies linked in that study, Egg consumption and heart health: A review (yet another literature review with no actual study) is mostly just saying 1) “cholesterol is often high in foods also high in saturated fats,” 2) “saturated fat is unhealthy,” 3) “ergo we can’t just conclude because something has cholesterol in it it’s unhealthy,” 4) “eggs are high in cholesterol but low in saturated fats,” 5) “eggs have all these nutrients that are useful,” 6) “therefore, eggs are healthy.”

  The error in this logic is between 5 & 6. We’re starting with the (false) assumption that cholesterol isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but you can’t go from Maybe Not Unhealthy + Cherrypicked Good Components = Healthy, you have to actually test the food.

  However, because everyone wants to convince themselves eating unhealthy food is healthy, faulty studies like this get reported in “health” magazines until when your doctor says “eating eggs is bad for you” you think “but I saw that study one time that says it wasn’t, maybe science just doesn’t know” (it does) and the egg industry is laughing all the way to the bank for successfully convincing you that the whole thing is too complicated for you to know or care.

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  • kameecoding@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9143438/

    source

    • seeigel@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Now whom to trust in this thread?

      source

      • exasperation@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        From this summary, The American Health Association still has a very modest recommendation to avoid excessive dietary cholesterol but no longer recommends a daily limit, and notes that foods high in cholesterol tend to be high in saturated fat, which does still show a link to serum cholesterol.

        In other words, foods that are high in cholesterol but low in saturated fat (like shellfish, and to some degree eggs) are still fine.

        I’d trust the American Heart Association over a video by a doctor who advocates for veganism through his books and media appearances. He seems to me to be more of an advocate (and isn’t very open about the fact that nutritionfacts.org is his own marketing website for promoting his specific products). And his books rely partially on data now known to be faulty, about “blue zones” where lots of people live past 100 (turns out each are hotspots for pension fraud so it’s hard to actually know how old people actually live in those places).

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