Would you like soya oil poured over your methionine spiked casein?

Having a great week off work with my daughter, mostly swimming and gardening, so that blogging is off the radar as I'm fairly much off line at the moment. But...


I guess everyone has seen the takedowns of "meat causes cancer" by Longo et al. so no need for me to chime in. One hundred percent guilty of issuing a press release suggesting causation from an observational study. Duh. Hysterical highlight that meat is cancer for the decade 55-65 years of age and then, come your pension (as a bloke), it becomes the elixir of life. Shrug.



In the same Aussie pile of wallanga pertaining to report science there was a slightly more interesting study published by Le Couteur et al using the standard crippled C57BL/6 mouse strain. They fed umpteen macronutrient ratios to umpteen mice and looked at the longevity. Remember, you cannot feed butter to C57BL/6 mice. Saturated fats break their brain, they have problems with their peroxisomes and with their first phase insulin response, so they in no way resemble any but the most unfortunate of human beings. Feeding them saturated fat is out unless you feed them a ketogenic diet. With that said, enjoy the last comment in this quote from the group:


"Although the mice on a high-protein diet ate less and were slimmer, they also had a reduced lifespan and poor heart and overall health.

Those on a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet ate more and got fat, but lived longest.

The mice that ate a high-fat, low-protein diet died quickest".


Executive summary: Fat = death.


A brief trip to supplementary data gives what the diets were made of:

"Diets varied in content of P (casein and methionine), C (sucrose, wheatstarch and dextrinized cornstarch) and F (soya bean oil)".

The only fat used was soya bean oil. Can I emphasise again, as many times before:

DO NOT CONSUME BULK CALORIES AS PUFA, ESPECIALLY OMEGA-6 PUFA.

A free "did you notice that?" snippet: Protein was "casein and methionine". Methionine restriction has been shown to prevent metabolic syndrome and possibly to extend lifespan. If you wanted to show protein was bad, might you spike casein by adding extra methionine? To complement the PUFA induced fat-badness??? How do these people sleep at night?

Peter