[acconrad]

Here's a link to the study (which, by the way, was unnecessarily difficult to find): http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

What a sensationalist and wrong headline. All it says is that "Total fat and saturated and unsaturated fats were not significantly associated with risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular disease mortality." So whether you have low or high fat in your diet, you could fill a good portion of that total caloric intake with protein instead of carbohydrates and that would still satisfy the claims that you can mitigate against "Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality".

They also don't define what "low" means in "low-fat" to define at what threshold would "kill you" (eyes roll). Doctors generally recommend 20-35% already[1] so I'm not sure how any of this is groundbreaking.

[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/reducing-fat-...

[jimrandomh]

Thank you for finding the link to the actual study. Can we have this edited to point to it, rather than the Telegraph's clickbaity reblog of it?

From the study:

> "Intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with lower risk of total mortality (quintile 5 vs quintile 1, total fat: HR 0·77 [95% CI 0·67–0·87], ptrend<0·0001; saturated fat, HR 0·86 [0·76–0·99], ptrend=0·0088; monounsaturated fat: HR 0·81 [0·71–0·92], ptrend<0·0001; and polyunsaturated fat: HR 0·80 [0·71–0·89], ptrend<0·0001)"

This is the sentence immediately before the one you quoted, and I believe it is deceptive to quote the non-result on CVD in particular, rather than the positive result on all-cause mortality.

[buu700]

whether you have low or high fat in your diet, you could fill a good portion of that total caloric intake with protein instead of carbohydrates and that would still satisfy the claims that you can mitigate against "Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality"

This doesn't contadict any of your points here, but: my understanding is that excess dietary protein is broken down into glucose via gluconeogenesis, in which case I suspect that the high-protein and high-carbohydrate diets wouldn't have significantly different results.

[acconrad]

Not exactly. Protein has a higher thermic effect in that it requires more energy from the body to break it down into amino acids. So say you fill both your glycogen and your amino acid requirements, given just proteins and carbs, while both will be converted to glucose, the metabolic effect required by the body to process protein will be higher than the carbohydrate.

[aluhut]

> Doctors generally recommend 20-35% already

I did not know that. So it was useful at least for me. However, thanks for reading.