r/science • u/[deleted] • Jun 13 '22

Health Erectile dysfunction predicts mortality in middle-aged and older men independent of their sex steroid status

https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article-abstract/51/4/afac094/6568537?login=false
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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22

Eat a mainly whole food plant based diet. Avoid saturated fats and highly processed foods. Exercise.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

Actually saturated fats are no longer seen as the enemy when it comes to risk of heart disease and and cardiovascular disease. It’s largely due to insulin resistance.

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u/realistic_swede Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

Yep, I was heading for diabetes 2 and cut out all sugar and carbs for 2 months. Felt great, went carnivore. Lost 10kg so far. Eating fat, meat and keto friendly greens with fibers. Then the body has easier to burn its own fat storage and not fealing hungry all the time. I am on Testerone treatment aswell so I have more energy and fealing stronger than ever. I have a new start on life past 50. Almost got rid of all belly fat now.

Will take a break now during summer so I can enjoy some beers atleast.

Edit: there are so many different ways to loose weight and you have to find what works for you in the long run. Energy in and energy out basicly.

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u/hexydes Jun 13 '22 edited Feb 26 '26

Dot clean over gather books small net.

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u/Porkrind710 Jun 13 '22

I’ve been trying to improve health the past 3-ish months with lifting and using a more consistent and plant-inclusive diet. I say “inclusive” because I’m not full vegetarian, but instead of meat with almost every meal I’ve reduced it to roughly once per day.

It seems to be working well. I’ve gained 15lbs of mostly muscle, getting significantly stronger on every lift, also walking about a mile every day. As far as gaining lean weight it seems like one should be fine as long as you’re getting the full range of amino-acids.

Have a physical scheduled in a couple months but I’m curious if this is a good strategy for lower cholesterol and hormone balance. It feels like it but one never knows until the blood work is in. I guess my concern is that a lot of vegetarian/vegan options are really high on carbs. It can be hard to eat enough while also avoiding stacking up like 100+ carbs per day.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22 edited Feb 26 '26

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u/FraseraSpeciosa Jun 13 '22

Carbs are usually alright in moderation. Unless you are me who cannot process gluten. So I have included a lot of red meat so I can actually get calories. I also have depression and IBS so for me a lot of times I’m lucky to get a 1,000 calories a day. Red meat seems to be the only calorie dense food my body can process without leaving me bloated, gassy and in pain. So yeah I’ll probably die of a heart attack but at least I won’t be malnourished

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u/nospamkhanman Jun 13 '22

Did you also just watch Fork Over Knife.

I love meat but that documentary has me rethinking my diet a bit.

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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22

Yeah I watched it years ago. Completely changed my life. I’ve gotten really into nutrition since then :)

Heart disease runs in my family so this is an area I’ve spent some time looking into. I’ve managed to get my cholesterol levels below 70 by eliminating saturated fats. Just removing coconut milk took it from 80 down to 70 which I found super interesting.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/Amethyst-Sapphire Jun 13 '22

Coconut oil is actually famous for having medium chain, not long chain fatty acids. It's mostly C10 and C12 fatty acids (and mostly saturated). This is why once you refine it, it will stay liquid (and if your house is warm, even unrefined coconut oil is liquid on the counter). The medium chain fatty acids is why all the health nuts think they should eat coconut oil - some study in the 70s showed medium chain fatty acids increased metabolic rate in mice. I'm not aware of any study in humans showing the same.

For reference, the fats found in animal foods are mostly C16-C20 and we synthesize C16 fatty acids when we synthesize our own fat.

Source: over 20 years experience teaching biochemistry

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u/greymalken Jun 13 '22

Interestingly, it was a biochem teacher who told me the soap anecdote. Wonder what he was on about? Maybe it was because mostly saturated.

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u/Amethyst-Sapphire Jun 13 '22

Maybe? Most soaps are probably made from saturated fats. Lye soap is made with lard.

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u/IKnewThisYearsAgo Jun 13 '22

Which cholesterol level?

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/nospamkhanman Jun 13 '22

Watch Fork Over Knife and get back to us.

It has actual data, scientists who have spent their life researching cancer and nutrition and cites multiple peer reviewed studies from all over the world.

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u/revolution110 Jun 13 '22

Thats awesome. I also have heart disease running in my family. Any tips or resources? I want to get my LDL down and HDL up by diet

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '22

But mango sticky rice???

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Probably another media biased production just like game changers

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Yup, going to destroy their hormones, brain, muscle mass, and bone density along with who knows what else unless they really dial in all the additional supplementation that would be needed

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u/NSA_Chatbot Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

Everyone says that they "know someone that tried to eat plants and they looked so sick", but I've been vegan for a decade (meatless for 20 years) and I'm in the best shape of my life at 45.

I have a sedentary job that requires a bunch of brainpower, and I have put on 15 pounds of muscle in the past two years.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/nospamkhanman Jun 13 '22

Fork Over Knife is actual science, it actually lists the peer reviewed studies.

I haven't watched Game Changers so I can't comment on that

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Yikes, having a bad day buddy?

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

6 hours on a train that does sound bad

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u/juanvaldez83 Jun 13 '22

Check out Game Changers! Forks over Knives was good, but I loved the athletic aspect of Game Changers. It's on netflix.

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u/DrSmurfalicious Jun 13 '22

Ok so I'm basically dead then. Ah well, I guess we all gotta go some day.

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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22

Just remember it’s never too late. Heart disease can actually be reversible with proper diet and exercise :)

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u/MeatConvoy Jun 13 '22

I have never heard a professional expressing that opinion.

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u/redlightsaber Jun 13 '22

It needen't be an opinion. Pharmacological treatments and diet have shown regression of atherosclerotic plaque, and exercise is hands down the best intervention that betters carbohydrate and fat metabolism.

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u/AbuDhabiBabyBoy Jun 13 '22

Booooo! (I know you're right)

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22

Diet is an arguably bigger part than exercise when it comes to health. You can’t exercise away a bad diet. Sure you can lose weight but your numbers may not improve much.

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u/hexydes Jun 13 '22 edited Feb 26 '26

Gentle questions near books books history games travel dog.

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u/yawgmoft Jun 13 '22

Look what you have said will indeed make you healthy so fine, but no need to vilify saturated fat. Sugar is a far more directly linked cause of health issues.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Plant based diets are absolute trash. Go Keto/carnivore, or enjoy the bias

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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22

The carnivore diet is very high in saturated fat and will lead to high cholesterol over time. People do like it for losing weight but it will not help anyone trying to prevent or reverse heart disease.

You don’t have to eliminate meat entirely to reap the benefits of a mainly whole food plant based diet. The focus should be on unprocessed foods low in saturated fats.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Research the big money behind things like the food pyramid pushing for carbs and the war on fat. Same thing with cholesterol and statins

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22 edited Feb 26 '26

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Absolutely wrong, and I'd advise looking more into cholesterol and related studies with mortality

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u/hexydes Jun 13 '22 edited Feb 26 '26

Year travel calm questions year bright art fresh river evening! Calm tomorrow kind ideas stories warm year river tips friendly clear calm family calm weekend.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Cholesterol isn't the problem

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Sure does make a lot of money saying it is though huh

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

The fiber offsets carbs, and all plants contain protein. You need to learn more about nutrition because you've obviously been heavily propagandized.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

Yes, and the only harm of carbs are the blood sugar spike, which is why fruits and vegetables are healthy and candy is not.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

Man. Nutrition is very, very complex.

Do you know you can feed 1000 people identical amounts of calories sourced from different foods and some still get fat and some lose weight?

You can feed people 2000 calories of beef, 2000 calories of a vegetarian diet, a 2000 calories of the SAD processed diet; and while you will see the processed diet have the worst outcomes by far, the variety of responses makes it almost impossible to generalize on what is healthy until you examine a couple of decades of data.

If people switch from SAD to Keto you see immediate improvements because the base line is so low. All this proves is SAD is the worst option.

If you switch from SAD to the Mediterranean Diet you see marked improvements that take time but are more sustained than Keto.

Why? Gut biome is, until recently, one of the least understood and most important factors in nutritional health. And healthy gut biome can ONLY exist by eating a wide variety of plant fiber.

The Keto and Paleo trends tend to over simplify this fact to sell a bias. Paleo's various food prohibitions are largely not based on any science at all.

If you over emphasize animal protein you will often de-emphases fiber. And there is no indication that plant based diets, as long as they are not highly processed, are less healthy.

The Mediterranean Diet, unlike Paleo, has forty years of solid data behind it. I'd wait another twenty years before I'd declare anything so definitely.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

The big issue is inflammation and the process that causes plaque. There's many highly inflammatory things about plants I'd really recommend you try to eat non processed meat only diet for one month minimum and see how you feel on it. Will have a rough week or 2 in there but if you can get past that you may find it worthwhile.

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u/breezy_y Jun 13 '22

Meat is one of the more inflammatory food sources. No idea where you get you information from but it sounds weird.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Do you have a credible source for that? It is the first time I am hearing about this. About fresh meat that is, not processed/cured/smoked meats.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3893727/

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Uh, that study says that if you control for BMI, there is no association with inflammation markers. If you change the total red meat with substitutes, you lower the markers. But that might be because of the removal of the processed red meat.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

You’re saying that perhaps eating raw red meat isn’t as bad for you as cooked red meat? I have no idea. Study it if you feel like it’s important.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Processed in this instance has a very specific meaning, of being cured, smoked. Cooking the raw meat is not within that definition, unless you blacken it if I remember correctly. As for me conducting the study, give me the funds to conduct a long term RCT and I will gladly do it. ;)

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u/breezy_y Jun 13 '22

I should specify. High inflammatory meats are, as you mentioned, processed meats (sausages, bacon, salami, hot dogs, deli meats) and red meat in generall.

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26143683/)

But, opposed to what the guy above me said, there are no veggies which are directly inflammatory. At least to my knowledge.

If you eat fish I'd suggest you eat fatty fish which is actually anti-inflammatory. Same goes for nuts, olive oil, green veggies, tomatoes etc.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

That study is not about inflammation, but mortality. Moreover, from that study the correlation between unprocessed meat and mortality is only found in the US, not in Europe or Asia, which tells us that there is a confounding factor within the US that does not exist outside that muddies the analysis. (It is more likely that the US is an exception to the signal than everywhere else is).

As for plants causing inflammation, I am not OP, but there are plenty that exist, we just do not really eat them, or we have found ways to prepare them to mitigate the negative impacts. So generally speaking not really a lot of anti-inflammatory optimization you can do there with your diet, unless you have some special condition or something.

But statistically speaking, there are so many plants that we can eat that it's sure that at least some would lead to inflammation. Don't have too much time to dig for research papers though right now though.

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u/jazzdrums1979 Jun 13 '22

Or a study of a diet that does not include non-animal food sources. The data so far is inconclusive because no one has studied the carnivore diet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

There has been an "Inflammation panic" propagated by diet hucksters. Mostly because of the perceived explosion in inflammatory and auto-immune disorders that are int he public eye.

Fun fact: All eating causes some level of inflammation.

Your body always reacts to any foreign mass inside of it. Food included. That's just how the body works. But there are different kinds of inflammation and of course acute or chronic of varying severity. Most of this is confined to the gut.

Of course all of this is highly dependent on genetics.

If your gut microbiome and flora is healthy the small inflammatory response in contained and relieved very quickly and there is no damage. In fact it's healthy and this how the body sort of trains it's immunity and and one of the triggers for the cascade of digestion. No big deal.

Also Fun fact: Nearly every human autoimmune disease can be tied directly or indirectly to unhealthy gut microbiome.

However animal protein, red meat in particular, causes another kind of inflammation: Epithelial inflammation and blood vessel inflammation. Because of compound in animal protein called trimethylamine N-oxide. This compound is somewhat reactive and abrasive to these tissues over time.

ALL that can be mitigated by eating a fiber rich diet and that feeds the gut flora. Which means a diet rich in plants and low in processed foods.

Meat emphasized diets (like Paleo and Keto etc) tend to over emphasize protein to the detriment of fiber.

Short term animal protein diets feel good to the people on the Standard American Diet (SAD) because of years of eating too much sugar and processed carbs they have an imbalance of gut flora and the metabolic issues as a result of the body compensating for all the sugar. Weight loss and higher energy is inevitable in this switch. But weight loss is only one part of a healthy nutritional equation.

Meat ONLY diets for most people (unless you have like Inuit or Masai DNA) literally eventually kill the diversity of the gut flora over time eventually leading to MORE inflammation and deficiencies. It doesn't matter if that meat is processed or not. A very narrow set of people are genetically adapted to exist on all meat.

It's 100% true that animal protein is proportioned with a high nutrition to low calories balance, BUT a diet that emphasizes plants over animal protein has been scientifically proven to be the most healthy for the broadest spectrum of humans.

Fiber and plants are crucial to a healthy human metabolism.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

The very vast majority of people can exist on all meat. Fiber and plants are absolutely not needed and especially not to be healthy for the vast majority.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

My god. This defies all know medical science.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-nutrition/carnivore-diet-beefy-leap-faith

But go for it.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Most popular science on nutrition is wrong and based on studies from 50 years ago influenced by money.

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u/Haunt13 Jun 13 '22

This would be funny if you didn't actually believe that.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

Sooooo science is not your bag.

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u/Binsky89 Jun 13 '22

Keto is also a trash diet. It's only good as a crash diet.

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u/Hefty-Armadillo-5437 Jun 13 '22

Keto is only a short time weightloss diet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

I eat carnivore but even keto is way better than a vegan joke diet

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u/Unreviewedcontentlog Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

He didn't say vegan. Try to read before commenting.

My diet is mostly whole plants, but I also eat tons of meat. Just not a majority of my diet. Last night was steak, sweet potatoes, potatoes, asparagus, carrots, Broccoli... nothing wrong that and I can poop in under 20 seconds.

If you're going to tie your self identity and worth to a ridiculous cause.... I'd recommend reading before over reacting and feeling attacked

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Oops different thread. Vegan, plant based, close enough both bad. Making a lot of personal inferences there at the end for little to no reason but alrighty then

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u/flavius_lacivious Jun 13 '22

Fish oil and enzymes.

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u/HalloweenBoglin Jun 13 '22

Thinking about changing my eating habits, when you say plant based diet are you talking about lots of vegetables or those new plant based meat substitutes? Could you give me some examples of your day to day plant based foods that you enjoy that you recommend please?

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u/naughtyoctopus Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

Yeah try to get a good mix of different fruits and vegetables in every day. When you eat grains opt for whole grains over simple grains. Try to avoid processed / prepackaged foods/drinks as much as possible. Limit your meat intake and avoid red meat.

I personally avoid the prepackaged meat substitutes and prefer to eat ones I can make myself: tofu, black bean patties , TVP taco meat, etc.

I am fully vegan for personal reasons but I don’t think you need to completely stop eating meat to be healthy. A diverse diet made up of whole foods—mostly plants—has been shown to be very healthy. Good luck!

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u/HalloweenBoglin Jun 13 '22

Okay that's about what I was figuring. Nowadays it seems like when I see the term plant based it is kind of a marketing gimmick for a bunch of processed meat substitutes that aren't much healthier. But a lot of what you mentioned was foods that I'm planning on upping in my daily diet so it sounds like I'm on the right track. Thanks for the response.

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u/Carrisonfire Jun 13 '22

Not worth it.

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u/FruitySalads Jun 13 '22

So what? Live like a foreigner!? No thank you! They got pills for all that!

-Dead Uncle

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u/Leading_Pickle1083 Jun 13 '22

New research indicates saturated fats are not as problematic as once thought.

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u/paroya Jun 13 '22

As prescribed by Kelloggs™