I keep hearing this, yet after 13 years of keto my cholesterol is still 100. Being fat is much higher-risk than eating fat.

I'm all for obese people taking Ozempic if they really need it, as well as thoroughly studying its long-term benefits and risks, but the fact that we're at the point of considering medical intervention as the population-wide solution to obesity is an abject failure of policy. Looking at our nutritional guidelines, you'd think everyone in America was an extreme athlete. All we have to do is:

1. Take something like the food pyramid, and put vegetables on the bottom, put fat/dairy/coconut and protein/meat/eggs/soy/mycelium in the next level up, put fruit in the next level up, and put starches and sugars on top. In other words: eat real food, mostly plants, without extreme high-carb macros, and treat fruits as dessert. Reverse the failed policy of demonizing saturated fat, and make this the official dietary recommendations for at least a generation.

2. Provide an incentive structure to use lower-GI ingredients in food products. For example, largely replace sugar with inulin fiber sweetened with stevia and/or monk fruit, and largely replace flour with alternatives made from blends of flax, wheat gluten, and resistant starch; no one will notice the difference. Stop letting Cheerios of all things market itself as "heart healthy", at least with its current formulation.

In this world, people would eat way more veggies because they'd grow up with parents and restaurants preparing them properly (with saturated fat and salt). Even for those who didn't, high fiber fortification of UPFs would provide a reasonable backstop. The low-fat/low-salt era's reframing of healthy food as "bland" is a crime against humanity.

For any fat people we still have after that, sure, put them all on Ozempic. It just shouldn't be the expected default that unmedicated people are fat while the medical establishment shrugs its shoulders and doubles down on half a century of empirically bad advice.

You might be happy to know we replaced the food pyramid years over a decade ago. With MyPlate, a visual representation of what your plate ought to look like when it's healthy. Half fruits and vegetables (mostly veggies), a little over 25% grains, a little under 25% protein (protein and fruits are depicted as the same). Dairy is the smallest of all, as a small cup off to the side.

Totally disagree with your idea that starches (grains + potatoes, I assume was your thinking) as the smallest thing. You say "eat real food, mostly plants" and then exclude fruits and grains. You keep complicating your own rule without explaining the complication.

> demonizing saturated fat

are you a cattle rancher? There is oodles of research that saturated fat is bad for you. Full stop.

Here are some literature reviews:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34649831/ (they actually have received funding from the beef industry and yet still agree that it looks like a diet high in SFA is linked to atherosclerotic heart disease)

On the other hand, you have bad faith actors like the ones who wrote this:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36477384/ where they argue the anti-SFA crowd is a conspiracy-theory laden, unscientific group. If you read their (laughable) conflict of interest statement, they never once actually say anything about themselves, instead just bragging about how they're producing "revelations [that have] never before seen the light"

I actually am too lazy to pull up more. But keto people love to talk about how it's all a conspiracy. I'm glad it works for you. It obviously doesn't work for humans at large.

No, not particularly. It's fine if you disagree with me, but MyPlate isn't similar to what I'm proposing.

are you a cattle rancher? There is oodles of research that saturated fat is bad for you. Full stop.

You're very confident about this. Are you a potato rancher? I've never personally seen a study which convincingly backed this claim up. What I have seen are plenty of bad studies which conflated "high-fat" with "high-calorie", or otherwise failed to isolate the effects of saturated fats.

Where's the long-term study showing that a diet with ~40%+ calories from non-UPF saturated fats, ~15% or fewer calories from carbohydrates, and an ample supply of green vegetables promotes atherosclerosis relative to a control diet with lower SFAs, higher carbs, and equal calories? Has this even been demonstrated in mice? Has reproducibility been demonstrated? Because I haven't seen it, and not for lack of trying.

But keto people love to talk about how it's all a conspiracy.

I never used the word "conspiracy". I don't doubt the government's policies in this area have been perfectly well-intentioned, but it's nevertheless a fact that we didn't have an obesity epidemic before the government began pushing guidelines that resemble the modern ones upon the 1977 conclusion of the McGovern committee.

If these guidelines and the studies used to justify them are so "obviously" great, it's funny how directly they correlate with the exact opposite of their intended effect.

https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077

And over a cup whipped for desert.

But I'm also 6'4".

When I ate the standard American diet I was about 40 lbs heavier than I am now.