You are wrong, according to Donald Hensrud, M.D. of the Mayo Clinic.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-and-nutrition/AN01037
Far be it from me to denigrate olive oil. The dietary establishment is usually foisting sugar bombs and other carbs on us. At least olive oil is a good healthy fat and, unlike most vegetable oils, it's something natural, not a frankenfood concocted in a laboratory somewhere. But people evolved to hunt down animals, not olives. That's what we are designed to eat and, as I said, it's also what our bodies are made of.
The general consensus in the medical community is that things like saturated fat, LDL cholesterol, and hypertension are bad for you, but there are reasons to seriously doubt the many of studies on which the consensus is based. Nearly all the studies that led to recommendations against them were not clinical but observational studies (which tend to confirm anything considered common knowledge, because people who take care of their health tend to follow mainstream recommendations), and they did take into account confounding factors like sugar consumption. The government in particular rushed to endorse specific recommendations despite knowing that the evidence was far from conclusive, because men like McGovern thought it was important to be seen taking quick action.
Well said. I should add that this whole hysteria started with Ancel Keys' famous seven country study back in the fifties. Only detail was that he actually had data from 21 countries. It's called cherry-picking and it's fraudulent.
If someone is going to consider pubmed worthless, I'm going to go ahead and consider his or her posts and opinions worthless.
Before you bruise your knees from genuflecting to official science , I'd suggest you read
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. Also re-read MagisterCultuum's post. He did a pretty good job of outlining the process.
Again, I'm interested in actual studies more than short blurbs by random doctors.
While I agree totally with your observation about random blurbs, there is something I am even more interested in than studies and that is
theory. Science is supposed to be about making explanations about how the universe work. Somehow theories have disappeared from science. There was a time, maybe sixty years ago, when science meant advancing a hypothesis and suggesting ways to prove or, especially, to disprove it. This is how our knowledge of the world increases.
Today everything is "studies show..." and "computer models prove..." This simply is wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Studies don't show anything and computer models don't prove anything. I really don't think that models have any value at all; they simply replicate the hypothesis in code. IOW, they are tautologies. As for studies, without a theory they are worthless too. The purpose of a study should be to prove or disprove a theory. And "dietary fat is bad for you" is
not a theory. A theory should attempt to explain why it's bad.
In his "Good Calories Bad Calories", Gary Taubes advances a hypothesis about proper diet (I'm not going to detail it here but it's about the role of insulin in metabolism), explains how this fits into the human metabolic system and suggests studies that could be performed to disprove his hypothesis. That's how science should is done. Interestingly, no one want to actually perform his study. After all, modern science is about advancing careers, NOT finding out truth.
As an illustration of the uselessness of studies without theories, consider the mantra we continually hear that eating indigestible crud that inflames your colon (cutely, they call this stuff "fiber") is good for you. Note well that they don't have any theory about the connection between "crud" and "good".
Instead they resort to the standard canard. "Studies show" that people who eat crud are healthier than the control group. Well, what is the "control group"? Naturally it's people who eat the Standard American Diet. IOW, crud is better than sugar bombs and other carbs that send your blood sugar through the roof. How about a study that compares those cut both the sugar bombs and the crud from their diet with those who eat only one of the two?
Even better, how about a bit of theory for a change?
