Dare I ask-saturated fat question?

Hi All.
Reading this thread 'bill gates' popped into my head
He loves to help the more needy than himself !
He was in one of the daily papers only this week and it covered
this fact.
Anna.

noblehead said:

Unlike the drug companies, the food manufacturers, and the public and private health agencies that have intimate financial ties to these industries, I don't profit from cultivating cholesterol paranoia.

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Does the proceeds from his book sales go to charity.........does anyone know?

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Why should he? Do you donate all of your salary to charity?

Snodger said:

yes, that's right - big randomised controlled trials that showed if you decrease your saturated fats, you lower your risk of heart disease. If you go to Google Scholar you can see pages and pages of academic articles about it:
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl= ... 5&as_sdtp=

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Ummmm, no they didn't: almost every high-quality (prospective) observational study ever conducted has found that saturated fat intake is not associated with heart attack risk (or with increased cholesterol):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
http://www.ajcn.org/content/77/5/1146.short
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1386252
http://www.ajcn.org/content/67/5/828.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 0711003145

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. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat.

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Saturated fat is only implicated in heart disease as part of the defunct: "diet-heart hypothesis", which states that increased cholesterol causes heart disease, saturated fat increases cholesterol, therefore saturated fat causes heart disease.

This is wrong because (a) it's based on childish logic and (b) saturated fat has only be observed to increase cholesterol in short term trials, over the longer term it has no significant effect.

Stephan Guyenet has a great overview of all that research that links saturated fat consumption with increased cholesterol (spoiler alert: there is none) http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 ... rease.html

Don't take my word for it (or even Stephan's), you can listen to one of the leading researchers in the field telling you that carbohydrates increase cholesterol, not saturated fats:
http://www.meandmydiabetes.com/2012/04/ ... t-depends/

We looked carefully at the saturated fat effects. With more saturated fat in the diet, we did see a signal for an increase in the overall amount of cholesterol in their blood. But when we looked more carefully, that slightly increased amount of total cholesterol was not being carried by more of the dangerous, small particle LDLs. It seemed to be carried more by larger particles. Actually, in the people eating more fat, and fewer carbs, the total particle concentration, which most people in our field think is a stronger signal of risk that total cholesterol, the total number of particles did not go up.

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When people ate more fat and less carbohydrate, the number of small particle LDLs remained low, and switching from monounsaturated to saturated fat didn’t increase their number at all. In fact, when people switched from mono- to saturated fat in this study, the large particle LDLs might have gone up a little bit, and the small particles went down. So by anybody’s current criteria about whats’s important for heart disease risk, saturated fat caused no increase in risk. That was clear to people who understand the role to the lipoprotein particles, as opposed to the overall cholesterol level, which I’m sure for some people is a subtle distinction.

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phoenix said:

Rather than plough through the history you might like to look at the last link first which summarises mainstream opinion in 2010 (there is of course more recent research but you have to stop somewhere!)
The role of reducing intakes of saturated fat in the prevention of cardiovascular disease: where does the evidence stand in 2010?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138219/

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Ho hum.

Meta-analyses of cohort studies with self-reported SFA intakes are not associated with CHD, stroke, or CVD

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Well at least they are prepared to admit that.

The fact that SFAs raise total and LDL cholesterol (lipid hypothesis) is well established by evidence from metabolic studies

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Oh yeah? Where are they then?

As Guyenet says:

the hypothesis that dietary saturated fat increases serum cholesterol. This idea is so deeply ingrained in the scientific literature that many authors don't even bother providing references for it anymore. When references are provided, they nearly always point to the same type of study: short-term controlled diet trials, in which volunteers are fed different fats for 2-13 weeks and their blood cholesterol measured

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Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol in humans. If it's a factor at all, it must be rather weak. It may be that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-reliance on the results of short-term controlled feeding studies.

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http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 ... rease.html

The bottom line is this: if saturated fat does cause increased cholesterol and/or CVD, then the extent of the influence is so small that it does not consistently show up in scientific studies (check out all the flip-flopping in Phoenix's link). It is probably fair to make the assumption that there is no link between saturated fat on cholesterol / CVD or that the effect is so small that it is unlikely to have any clinical significance.

The same cannot be said of dietary carbohydrate.