Here's a thought experiment. Imagine if every fatty acid in your gut is contained in a cell that will independently try its best to maintain homeostasis. When it's under stress -- from any source -- it will secrete hormones.
Now imagine an anorexic woman who recovers, but she overcorrects and ends up overweight in the eyes of her anorexic friends. They shame her for overeating and she tries to eat less, which puts her adipose cells under stress. Is it possible that she'd keep gaining weight from the stress of undereating? If it's impossible, how do you know? If it's not impossible, should we blame anorexics the same way we blame people with habits that you think are bad?
This is the moment I decide I'm absolutely done battling nerds who think that because they understand computers (usually badly) they understand everything about complex metabolic processes. The lack of humility is seriously mind-boggling.
There's a scientific consensus that you understand nothing about. People spend their lives on this stuff.
Recommendations have certainly changed as new information came out -- we also discovered iodine and B vitamins -- but is there any government agency in the Western world that recommends a high-lard diet? If not I think you're batting out of your league.
Not that this absolutely needs to be said, but lard isn't pure saturated fat, and the unrendered fat of an animal is an organ.
I'm willing to wager that we thought saturated fat was bad for a very good reason, and it's not one of the reasons touted by people who want to eat deep fried bacon wrapped hot dogs for every meal. My first thought when someone calls a scientific consensus a scare is that they have an agenda. You'll see similar language in climate change denial. Yes, new data comes out and some theories are shown to not be perfect, but if you're getting your education from internet memes and hacker forums and scattered papers you're going to draw conclusions that miss things. It's also a matter of whether whichever studies are being touted right now are representative of the larger scientific landscape.
The fat scare is far from over. Not everyone spends time on Hacker News or controversial diet channels on youtube.
Moreover, nutrition is a lot more complex than "fad in, fad out". The subcutaneous fat of an animal can hold some pretty toxic stuff -- that's kind of its purpose. It wasn't a scare, people were just missing nuance and still more research needs to be done.
I agree, but there's a certain line that a good software engineer should not cross and that's where their improved social skills make local gf attainment feasible, because then they'll start devoting their time to other things.
In my case I can already see my increased HN karma pulling me away from our tablegen spec. With a gf I'd be useless.