[etagobla]

The fat scare is far from over. Not everyone spends time on Hacker News or controversial diet channels on youtube.

Moreover, nutrition is a lot more complex than "fad in, fad out". The subcutaneous fat of an animal can hold some pretty toxic stuff -- that's kind of its purpose. It wasn't a scare, people were just missing nuance and still more research needs to be done.

[Cougher]

"It wasn't a scare, people were just missing nuance"

This reads like post-hoc rationalization about the claim (scare) that saturated fat causes heart disease, because that's what the scare was about. As far as toxins in fat goes, the primary toxin that I've seen discussed is dioxin and that scare tactic is sorely missing nuance.

[etagobla]

I'm willing to wager that we thought saturated fat was bad for a very good reason, and it's not one of the reasons touted by people who want to eat deep fried bacon wrapped hot dogs for every meal. My first thought when someone calls a scientific consensus a scare is that they have an agenda. You'll see similar language in climate change denial. Yes, new data comes out and some theories are shown to not be perfect, but if you're getting your education from internet memes and hacker forums and scattered papers you're going to draw conclusions that miss things. It's also a matter of whether whichever studies are being touted right now are representative of the larger scientific landscape.

[Cougher]

That's an interesting mix of red herrings and what I'm going to call Cougher's Law: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving climate change approaches 1. The good news is that your red herrings are low in saturated fat, so you can use them to your heart's content rather than to its detriment.

[etagobla]

http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

This is the moment I decide I'm absolutely done battling nerds who think that because they understand computers (usually badly) they understand everything about complex metabolic processes. The lack of humility is seriously mind-boggling.

There's a scientific consensus that you understand nothing about. People spend their lives on this stuff. Recommendations have certainly changed as new information came out -- we also discovered iodine and B vitamins -- but is there any government agency in the Western world that recommends a high-lard diet? If not I think you're batting out of your league.

Not that this absolutely needs to be said, but lard isn't pure saturated fat, and the unrendered fat of an animal is an organ.

[nradov]

Which toxins does subcutaneous beef fat contain in signification concentrations?