Gilgamesh wrote:Richard, sorry, didn't mean to pick nits, but it's worth emphasizing: the PREDIMED study is pretty seriously flawed. But I generally agree with you on EVOO! -- at least as far as my own consumption goes. But that's mostly because I just love the stuff, and it's a good tool for preventing my seemingly unstoppable weight loss.... I just wanted to flag one of the problems with the study (there are many -- the methods section doesn't even allow one to know how much olive oil was actually consumed).
GB - I'm sure there are lots of different opinions on
PREDIMED, don't worry about picking nits. I've been down enough rabbit holes to have dealt with plenty myself. As I read it, the "low fat" diet did not meet target, but from my reading of clinical nutrition trials, that is fairly standard for the low fat arms. For published nutrition trials, I've seen "low fat" diets reducing fat from a standard diet by a few percent (think 35-37% down to 30%). Ornish and the other ultra-low fat guys are the exception. On the flip side, a lot of LCHF boosters will nearly always complain about results from the "high fat" diet conditions because those typically are only a few percent higher than the standard diets. "They did not get the results I would expect because it clearly did not go far enough in raising
(fill in your favorite macronutrient).
It is a challenge to find the observed intake because most of the 30+ papers based on
PREDIMED reference the original paper. This is a common practice for follow-up papers to save space repeating methods that were previously published. The target was 50g EVOO for that arm of the study. I was impressed that the estimated intake was, in fact, very close to 50g/day.
I was consuming 80 g of EVOO/day at one point. ("Can't drink booze, what do I put in this shot glass that's on the table during dinner -- that will be yummy and pretty??") I've now cut that in half, and am probably going to go much lower. I dug into the the research supporting EVOO a while back and was left with the impression that MUFAs might not be so good -- might, in fact, be a bit bad. "Eat olives!", as our Gene says, might be the best conclusion (or maybe -- though I haven't looked into this -- even olive leaf extract, esp. if you're worried about Na intake). Tightly controlled animal experiments with MUFAs and work with humans (epid'l or otherwise) have divergent results --
80g/day of EVOO? How do you did that without disaster pants?
I remember reading a study directly comparing EVOO, refined olive oil and a control diet. The refined olive oil had the MUFA's but not the polyphenols and showed no benefit. When I read that and followed up with finding out the high polyphenol content of olives, I decided eating olives as a whole foods started to make a lot more sense than relying mainly on their oil.