Dramatically Improved Heart Health in Sweden!
Swedes are becoming heart-healthier, faster!
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare recently released the latest statistics for the risk of myocardial infarctions in Sweden, up to the year 2013. This is encouraging reading for almost everyone… except for those who are desperately looking for signs that increased butter-consumption has something to do with heart disease.
The years when LCHF has been popular and butter sales in Sweden have more than doubled – from 2008 – are highlighted in green in the image. The risk of heart disease is not on its way up, as some have warned, but rather the risk is going down faster than ever!
Swedes are consuming a lot more butter and at the same time getting more heart healthy than ever before.
How will the outdated fat-fearing people at our agency for dietary guidelines explain away this? They’ll probably continue their usual tactics: acting as though nothing has happened. Or what do you think?
Previously
The Real Association Between Butter and Heart Disease in Sweden
TIME: Eat Butter. Scientists Labeled Fat the Enemy. Why They Were Wrong.
Saturated Fat Completely Safe According to New Big Review of All Science!
Heart Doctor: Time to Bust the Myth About Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
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Our figures are as flat as a tack
Kg/per person/per year includes 'blends'.
2009/10 (r) 3.9
2010/11 (r) 3.9
2011/12 (r) 3.9
2012/13 (p) 3.7
Figures back to 1990 show a small increase:
http://www.thedairysite.com/articles/3516/australian-dairy-farming-ov...
http://www.swedishmatch.com/SwMImages/Tables%20and%20graphs/Forsaljni...
But the thing is still.. that those alarmes about increasing CVD becuse of LCHF is only in some peoples mind!
What about trans fats?
I don't know if you were replying to me, but if so, I was answering the questions in the last paragraph of the post. I'm not saying that butter is evil, and that the numbers improved despite the increased consumption of butter. I don't think butter has much to do with heart disease, either way, so I wonder how the other conventional suspects (smoking, trans fats) behaved during the same time frame.
In genuine science, models are used to predict outcomes and are rejected if the predictions fail. As Richard Feynman observed, "If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."
Here he explains the principle to a class at my alma mater: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
Why not?
It may be that by displacing refined carbs with anything else we might see this positive effect but surely that does not rule out the possibility that saturated animals fats -- such as butter from cows grazing on new Spring grass -- also has benefits.
Do you have any trials to back up your position that butter has no effect per se?
When CHD was at its peak in those countries, butter consumption was also at its peak. Whatever caused CHD, then, which seems unlikely to have been butter (margarine was illegal in New Zealand), butter couldn't have provided much protection or the historical narrative would be quite different.
Your "best evidence" puts me in mind of compilation albums like "The Best of the Bay City Rollers"... if all their songs were terrible to begin with, then a compilation of their "best" still does not amount to anything worth listening to :-P
The opinion stated was that butter made no difference per se, one way or the other
I questioned the basis for this position and offered that we cannot yet "rule out the possibility that saturated animals fats -- such as butter from cows grazing on new Spring grass -- also has benefits"
I said nothing about "butter [having] a significant cardioprotective effect in the normal diet"
To even begin to answer this, you would need to first define a "normal diet" and then clearly establish parameters for "a significant cardioprotective effect".
Obviously (I hope) the fact that butter supplies K2, D3, retinol, CLA, carotenoids, butyrate etc gives it some nutritional value, and cardioprotection has a lot to do with nutritional status (this is why the Finns supplemented with selenium, for example).
Butter is not sugar or flour, it's a fat that can replace energy from carbohydrate, that's useful too.
However, all this can be done with other foods.
Has it even been established that heart disease has anything to do with type of dietary fats? RCTs of replacing butter with other fats have been pretty inconclusive; this result works both ways.
Butter is just fat and some vitamins. LCHF, that's a different proposition, even if you do it with olive oil it'll still work.
This is a question you should be posing to those responsible for dietary guidelines over the past many decades.. including the most recent, which calls for cutting saturated fats even more.
On what basis do they make these reccomendations?
No, it won't. Please do not make sweeping statements, which are not supported by knowledge/experience, unless it is your experience - is it ?.
While I agree with some of the more cautionary commenters that epidemiological changes are enormously complex and cannot scientifically be pinned to one specific stimulus, still one belief this development strongly discredits is that butter causes heart disease.
If it did, then increased consumption would certainly be correlating with increased incidence.
But that is the only valid conclusion we can derive here (and even it is not foolproof). To extrapolate other beliefs from it is scientifically nonsensical.
This is not a valid argument. You cannot shift the burden of proof, as if it's somehow a given that butter has an effect.
If in the context of epidemiological evidence, you want to assert that a single stimulus (in this case, butter) has an effect, then you bear the burden of corroborating that claim.
You cant claim butter is the variable when the trend precededs it by nearly twice its implementation time. This is really poor science on the part of the editor of this page.
I think you need to retract
You cant claim butter is the variable when the trend precededs it by nearly twice its implementation time. This is really poor science on the part of the editor of this page.
I think you need to retract
Associations among 25-year trends in diet,
cholesterol and BMI from 140,000 observations in men and women in Northern Sweden, Johansson et al. Nutrition Journal 2012, 11:40.
The editor is not saying that butter has prevented heart disease; the point is that increased butter consumption and higher cholesterol is not causing more heart disease in the context of a low-carb revolution (among a significant minority). At the same time there is more statin prescribing and growing average BMI. You could attribute decline to statins - but they don't reduce mortality much in RCTs, mainly events, and mortality is declining sharply; and if statins are working in a population with rising cholesterol, you have to ask why that would be, aren't they supposed to prevent heart attacks by lowering cholesterol? You couldn't attribute the decline to the rising BMI.
You could attribute it to chance - diseases and epidemics come and go naturally, which is why there needs to be a placebo, untreated arm in a trial.
Or you could say, well butter and LCHF don't seem to be doing Sweden any harm.
If you look at the official statistics on cardiac (AMI) mortality on this calculator they are even more impressive, I think, than the graph in the blog.
http://www.socialstyrelsen.se/statistics/statisticaldatabase/ami