Things to Worry About This Week: Coconut Oil, French Fries, and Anything Else You Eat
How radically new advances in science have changed our understanding of nutrition? Not much this week. We look at three studies on potatoes, coconut oil, and vegetarian diets.
Coconut oil loses its luster
Headline : Coconut oil is just as bad for you as beef tallow and butter.
History : Coconut oil is rich in saturated fats, like lard and butter, but it has the best reputation. It just seems healthier, you know? Makes baked goods fluffy and hair shiny . It may even have a small fat-burning effect (maybe, I repeat, maybe), but it’s also a big pile of calories like any other fat or oil. So if you thought of it as completely free and healthy food, you were already overly optimistic.
Today’s news is the American Heart Association’s recommendation that we should stop eating so much saturated fat. This includes coconut oil. But their research does not specifically link coconut oil to heart disease, except that coconut oil raises LDL (bad) cholesterol to the same extent as butter.
Cholesterol levels are not the same as disease risk, and we cannot ignore previous research that suggests saturated fat may not be all that bad for you . Diet fat is a really tricky question, and we still don’t have clear answers about whether oil or coconut oil is bad for you. It’s okay if you want to skip coconut oil. But we have no evidence that this will actually affect your health.
Takeaway : Coconut oil is full of calories and saturated fat, so please don’t think eating in large amounts is cool. If you use a lot of it in your diet (or butter or lard, for that matter), you can be careful and replace some of that with olive oil.
Potatoes are not poison
Headline : ” Eating French fries twice a week can lead to premature death,” says the study.
History : This is actually the result of astudy of people at risk of developing knee arthritis . To get on the list, they must have been overweight or have some other reason why they are particularly likely to develop arthritis. When they signed up for the study, they answered a questionnaire about how often they ate different food groups in the past year.
The researchers do not say in their study whether they started looking for data on the risks associated with potatoes, or whether they did an analysis for every food in this study (and perhaps other studies too?) And decided to report one thing that turned out to be positive. In this case, the results will become much less reliable: if you look long enough, you will almost always find something that seems significant. Either way, this study can’t tell if fried potatoes are bad for you; it simply says that people who ate a lot of fries had a higher mortality rate than people who did not. This PopSci article explains the problems in more detail.
There are two really important caveats here. The researchers left out two very important factors: whether the people who ate french fries had a less healthy diet or lifestyle in general; and whether people who ate french fries had lower incomes, which is definitely associated with poorer health . And these are two big things to miss.
Takeaway : This study does not support the idea that fried potatoes are deadly. But if you eat healthy foods, your diet probably won’t have a ton of fries anyway.
Vegetarian diets are okay
Caption : Science Finds Vegetarian Diet Is Twice As Effective For Weight Loss
History : The vegetarian diet outperformed the omnivorous diet in one recent weight loss study … something like that.
The study involved 74 people with overweight and type 2 diabetes. Half of them followed a vegan diet, with the exception of a serving of yogurt. The other half followed a standard diabetes diet. People who follow a nearly vegan diet have lost more weight and are more likely to stick to this diet.
There is already reason for skepticism: the study is small and quite specific: if you are not diabetic, or your idea of a vegetarian diet includes eggs and cheese, these results probably will not apply to you. Here’s a more detailed explanation of the limitations of the study .
Another important caveat: people on a vegetarian diet were also more likely to lose muscle, even if they exercised.
Takeaway : A very specific vegetarian diet worked for some people, but the research is too small and limited to be generalized to all vegetarian diets for all people. There are many different diets that work , but to find the right one for you, you just have to try and see.