Saturated Fats & Heart Attacks

[CatsFive]

I grew up in the 1940s-60s when fat was a normal part of our diet, and I've always eaten normal full fat dairy, cheese, and meat. It's never done me any harm and actually was the main reason I was able to control my T2 so quickly after diagnosis - I could simply cut out all the high carb stuff, and still be getting enough fuel from my usual fat consumption to provide my main energy needs.

I actually remember trying some reduced fat yoghurt when low/reduced fats first became the "in thing" and it tasted like I imagined a pot of chalky water might do - this was before they realised that that something often needed to be added to replace the missing fat to make items more palatable again....

Just wondering, will you know if it's done you any harm until harm happens? BTW I'm another person that eats butter, drinks full-fat milk, eats full-fat yoghurts and rather likes fatty cuts of meat...

 

[ianf0ster]

Just wondering, will you know if it's done you any harm until harm happens? BTW I'm another person that eats butter, drinks full-fat milk, eats full-fat yoghurts and rather likes fatty cuts of meat...

While I appreciate that it's near impossible to prove a negative i.e. that animal mainly saturated fats don't harm us, consider the following:

1. Ancel Keys implicated saturated fat for causing heart disease which was still relatively rare at that time when a US president in his 50's had a heart attack. To do that he selected 7 countries (from over 20 for which he had data). The 7 selected appeared to show a strong correlation, but taking all of them combined there was absolutely no correlation.

2. It is now known that smoking is implicated in heart attacks and that President was a chain smoker (as was my Dad who died of a heart attack at the age of 45 in 1966 (it was not his first - probably his 3rd thought to bad indigestion).

3. Despite a campaign for low fat, heart attacks didn't change much leading to many more cardiac doctors being trained in the UK. Then smoking was banned in public indoors - and heart attacks suddenly dropped!

4. In this forum we know that eating saturated fat helps reduce our weight just as eating carbohydrates tends to increase our weight. Yet sat fat is still blamed for making people fat. It also helps control T2 diabetes which itself is a major cause to heart attacks. So how is it causing more heart attacks while reducing a major cause of them?

5. Many medical studies, plus the figures from Dr David Unwin's GP Practice patients show that on a Low Carb (higher fat) diet his patients have (on average) much better HDL figures, much better Triglyceride figure and even lower LDL figures. So even if one believes that high LDL is automatically 'bad' (which I don't) How is it that saturated fat can ''lower' the LDL that it is blamed for raising in the first place?

6. Lastly, the observation that the majority of heart attacks happen to patients with 'normal' LDL or rather than those with 'high' LDL.

 

[CatsFive]

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6. Lastly, the observation that the majority of heart attacks happen to patients with 'normal' LDL or rather than those with 'high' LDL.

What percentage of each group have heart attacks?

 

[ianf0ster]

What percentage of each group have heart attacks?

I don't have the figure to hand, but as you might expect the proportion of those with 'normal' LDL figures is lower than that of those with higher LDL figures. However if LDL was as good a marker for heart disease as Diabetes is (8 times as much as LDL), then even the absolute number of heart attacks with 'normal' LDL should be lower.
Nearly 75% are hospitalized had LDL indicating they were at low risk of heart attack. And almost 50% had LDL in the 'optimal' range . And more than 50% of patients hospitalised for heart attack had HDL categorized as poor. UCLA health 12/1/2009

Of course Statin manufacturers say this shows that the current reference ranges for LDL level are too high. But it makes you wonder why they ignore HDL (not really, because it is known that using drugs to raise HDL has no beneficial effect so far, until they gave up trying).

So my way of looking at it is: - If I have normal glucose and insulin levels (through LCHF) then then I'm effectively non-diabetic and thus have reduced my risk many times more than reducing my LDL would. And since LCHF has almost doubled my HDL and almost halved my Triglycerides, that seems like a much better trade-off than reducing LDL alone.