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Home » Diets that Work » What to Worry About This Week: Coconut Oil, Fries, and Everything Else You’re Eating – Lifehacker

How drastically have new advances in science changed what we know about nutrition? This week, just a little. Were looking at three studies on potatoes, coconut oil, and vegetarian diets.

The headline: Coconut Oil Is as Bad for You as Beef Fat and Butter

The story: Coconut oil is high in saturated fat, just like lard and butter, but it has a better reputation. It just seems healthier, you know? It makes your baked goods fluffy and your hair shiny. It may even have a small fat-burning effect (maybe, I repeat, maybe), but its also a big pile of calories just like any other fat or oil. So if you were thinking of it as a totally free, wholesome health food, you were already a little too optimistic.

Todays news is an advisory from the American Heart Association that says we should quit eating so much saturated fat. That includes coconut oil. But their studies dont specifically link coconut oil with heart disease, except to say that coconut oil raises LDL (bad) cholesterol as much as butter.

Cholesterol levels arent the same as disease risk, and we cant ignore previous studies that say saturated fat may not be so bad for you. Dietary fat is actually a really tricky subject, and we still dont have clear answers on whether butter or coconut oil is harmful. Its fine if you want to back away from the coconut oil. But we dont have the evidence to say if that will make a real difference to your health.

Who doesnt love logging on to the good old net on a Friday morning to the headline Coconut oil

The take-away: Coconut oil is full of calories and saturated fat, so please dont think its totally cool to eat in large quantities. If you use a lot of it in your diet (or butter or lard, for that matter), you might want to err on the side of caution and replace some of that with olive oil.

The headline: Eating French Fries Twice a Week Could Lead to Early Death, Study Says

The story: This actually comes from a study of people at risk of getting arthritis in their knees. To be included, they had to be overweight or have another reason to be especially 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 dont say in their study whether they started off looking for data on the risks of potatoes, or whether they ran the analysis for every food in this study (and maybe other studies too?) and decided to report the one thing that turned up positive. If thats the case, the results become a lot less valid: if you look long enough, youll almost always find something that seems significant. Either way, this study cant say whether eating fries is bad for you; it just says that people who ate a lot of fries had a higher mortality rate than people who didnt. This PopSci article explains the problems in a bit more detail.

There are two really important caveats here. The researchers didnt control for two very important factors: whether people who ate fries happened to have a less healthy diet or lifestyle in total; and whether people who ate fries were lower income, which is definitely associated with worse health. And those are two big, big things to miss.

The take-away: This study does not support the idea that fries are deadly. But if you eat healthy, you probably wont have a ton of fries in your diet anyway.

The headline: Science Finds a Vegetarian Diet Is Twice as Effective in Reducing Body Weight

The story: A vegetarian diet outperformed an omnivorous diet in one recent weight loss study...sort of.

The study involved 74 people who were all overweight and had type 2 diabetes. Half of them ate a diet that was vegan except for a serving of yogurt. The other half got a pretty standard diabetes management diet. The people on the near-vegan diet lost more weight, and were more likely to stick to the diet.

Theres already reason to be skeptical: the study is small, and it was specific enough that if youre not diabetic, or if your idea of a vegetarian diet involves eggs and cheese, these results probably dont apply to you. Heres a more in-depth explanation of the studys limitations.

Another big caveat: the people on the vegetarian diet were also more likely to lose muscle, even though they were exercising.

The take-away: A very specific vegetarian diet worked well for some people, but the study is too small and limited to be generalized to all vegetarian diets for all human beings. There are a lot of different diets that work, but to find the right one for you, youll just have to try and see.

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What to Worry About This Week: Coconut Oil, Fries, and Everything Else You're Eating - Lifehacker

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Home » Diets that Work » What to Worry About This Week: Coconut Oil, Fries, and Everything Else You’re Eating – Lifehacker