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[Health Impact News] It’s amazing how analysis of scientific studies regarding saturated fats and heart disease changes when one does not start out with the presupposition that “saturated fat is evil and causes clogged arteries and heart disease,” which has been repeated so many times over the past couple of decades that it came to be believed as a “known fact [2]“. Saturated fat is an essential part of food and health, however, and once researchers began to question this belief and look at the data more objectively, what they actually found was quite different.
In 2010 probably the most publicized analysis was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It was conducted in the United States at the Department of Atherosclerosis Research of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California. The title of the study was “Saturated fat, carbohydrate, and cardiovascular disease.” The researchers who conducted the study seemed to be concerned that the dietary guidelines proposing a reduction in saturated fats was resulting in a higher intake of carbohydrates, which negatively affects health. The study was significant because it was a review of several other studies covering a period of 5 to 23 years of follow-up on 347,747 subjects. Their conclusion: “A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.” The summary of this study is found here [3].
Now another study with similar results has been published in the Netherlands, in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine. The title of the study is “Saturated fat, carbohydrates and cardiovasculardisease.” Here is the abstract:
The dietary intake of saturated fatty acids (SAFA)is associated with a modest increase in serum totalcholesterol, but not with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Replacing dietary SAFA with carbohydrates (CHO), notably those with a high glycaemic index, is associated withan increase in CVD risk in observational cohorts, while replacing SAFA with polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is associated with reduced CVD risk. However, replacing a combination of SAFA and trans-fatty acids with n-6 PUFA (notably linoleic acid) in controlled trials showed no indication of benefit and a signal toward increased coronary heart disease risk, suggesting that n-3 PUFA may be responsible for the protective association between total PUFA and CVD. High CHO intakes stimulate hepatic SAFA synthesis and conservation of dietary SAFA. Hepaticde novo lipogenesis from CHO is also stimulated during eucaloric dietary substitution of SAFA by CHO with high glycaemic index in normo-insulin aemic subjects and during hypocaloric high-CHO/low-fat diets in subjects with the metabolic syndrome. The accumulation of SAFA stimulates chronic systemic low-grade inflammation through its mimicking of bacterial lipopolysaccharides and/or the induction of other pro-inflammatory stimuli. The resulting systemic low-grade inflammation promotesinsulin resistance, real location of energy-rich substrates and atherogenic dyslipidaemia that concertedly give rise to increased CVD risk. We conclude that avoidance of SAFA accumulation by reducing the intake of CHO with high glycaemic index is more effective in the prevention of CVD than reducing SAFA intake per se.
You can download and read the entire study here [4].
See also:
Enjoy Saturated Fats, They’re Good for You! [5]