Recent nutrition science says they’re harmless, but when I looked up the papers, many showed that saturated fat and cholesterol significantly increased mortality.
It’s worth noting that there are 2 types of cholesterol; LDL and HDL (low density lipoproteins and high density lipoproteins).
HDL is actually considered “good” and LDL “bad” and intake of HDL can help reduce LDL.
Saturated fat is not inherently bad although correlational studies show that higher intakes are correlated with cardiac disease and events. The consensus is generally to keep it below a certain threshold and try to eat unsaturated fat sources.
It’s important to note though that correlation is not causation. So yes there is a correlation, but people who eat high levels of saturated fats are often engaging in other behaviours not considered healthy. So higher calorie diets, higher intake of low nutrient foods, lower fibre intake, smoking and drinking etc so it can be hard to seperate what is that actual cause and how many of these factors come together to contribute to cardiac ill health. Its very hard to seperate out or isolate these factors making it tricky.
Foods are way more complex than just good or bad and everything needs to be in context.
I saw someone else comment that they’ve been demonised too much and I agree. Many foods get a bad wrap because the media create sensationalised headlines everytime a piece of research comes out that even hints at the possibility something causing an issue regardless of how well or poorly written the study is, it makes money.
Just eat well in general, make sure you move and you will be fine.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/different-fats-nutrition/
The link is from the UK national health service website and has info about fat and cholesterol.
They are not bad. It’s that most people do not get enough exercise and they also usually over-consume these macro-nutrients and that is where the problem is. They’ve never actually been bad for you. Just get exercise and use moderation and you will be ok.
While saturated fats have been shown to be a vital part of your diet, it is by no means harmless, like most things you put in your mouth, the poison is in the dose. Whole foods like eggs, meats, with saturated fat is perfectly fine, but when you start eating processed foods (most oils, pastries etc) you can get much more than what your body can handle
Dietary cholesterol isn’t so bad anymore, if at all, might even depend on your genes. And while you don’t want to increase the cholesterol levels in your blood, eating more of it doesn’t necessarily increase your LDL(the one that is associated with most problems) or HDL in your blood.
Anything in excess is bad, however saturated fat and cholesterol have been demonized for many years from old science. This is when they were telling us margarine was better than butter, skim milk is better than 2%, eggs are bad…we know better now.
One of the leading neuroscientists - Dr David Perlmutter claims that cholesterol is such a powerful antioxidant for the brain, that if you don’t get any through your diet, your chances of developing Alzheimer’s is greater.
Animal fat (including saturated fat) and cholesterol don’t cause heart attacks or cardiovascular disease. This myth has been debunked since the 70s. Chronic inflammation is what causes cardiovascular disease (CVD) and increases your chances of getting cancer later in life. Inflammatory foods, such as processed sugar, hydrogenated vegetable / seed oils, artificial sweeteners, gluten, GMOs, processed foods, etc, plus nutrient deficiencies create, promote and exacerbate chronic inflammation. Cholesterol then gets deposited on / in the vascular walls by the body as a protective mechanism against inflammation. It’s not the cholesterol that is the culprit there. It’s the damage done by the inflammation. Accusing cholesterol of being a promoter / perpetrator of CVD is like accusing the police of committing a crime; they are always there when a crime happens. Truth is, they are first responders, not the culprits. Many people get confused about that and wrongfully fear / avoid animal-based products altogether. Obviously, not all animal-based products are healthy for you, but some are very beneficial and even necessary for your health.
Not recent, many years old. Saturated fat and cholesterol being bad and linked to CVD is very disproven at this point. It was removed as a “nutrient of concern” back in the 2015 USDA revision, and that was years after it was debunked.
Too much of saturated fat raises cholesterol levels. High cholesterol is linked with higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
“The American Heart Association recommends aiming for a dietary pattern that achieves 5% to 6% of calories from saturated fat.”
So having some saturated fat in your diet is fine, having too much is risky. Glorifying saturated fat and claiming it’s healthy to consume in large amounts is dangerous.
Almost all the studies about cholesterol being linked to worse longevity are survey studies.
They just ask people what they eat and they don’t actually measure direct causation.
People with high cholesterol diets, for example, tend to already be eating more than they should and tend to be obese. Of course that’s going to impact longevity.
The studies fail to address confounding factors, and the few studies that have actually measured the effects high cholesterol has on people by giving them different diets and tracking them, have discovered that high cholesterol on its own does not necessarily cause premature death or cardiovascular illness.
Also, the whole movement against saturated fat, the fats from milk and cheese and animals and coconuts that people have been eating for literally millions of years without problem, was founded solely by the American Heart Association.
Google “American Heart Association Procter and Gamble Radio Challenge”
The AHA received tens of millions of dollars in “donations” when they were starting up from the developers of Crisco, the pioneers of replacing tallow, butter, and satfats with PUFA seed oils.
Before then, these seed oils were only used as an industrial lubricant, now they are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as they are in ALL of our processed foods. Every condiment you have ever had from a restaurat, like dipping sauces at a Pizza place, were not “garlic” or “cream”, their first ingredient is all soybean oil and canola oil.
Since anti-satfat proponets LOVE bringing up their correlational studies, how about you go on PubMed and search the correlation between the increase of seed oils in the diet in the 60’s and cardiovascular disease.
Or the fact that Israel has the highest ratio of consumed Omega 6 seed oils in all of europe, and they have the worst cardiovascular health and most heart attacks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Omega 6 or Seed oils, but the amounts we eat them in are incredibly unhealthy, as are the way that most of them are processed (Pubmed “seed oils, aldehydes”).
None of your ancestors ate literal gallons of canola oil per year, at an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of 1:40, until about 70 years ago.
Vs. The people that have literally been drinking milk and eating dairy since before Biblical times, and your primate ancestors who have been eating animal fat in their cooking for tens of thousands of years, and millions of years before that.
No you can’t eat unlimited saturated fats and be healthy, but you cant do that with any other nutritional group either. You should not avoid Saturated Fats as a whole. Absolutely absurd sentiment that has only been held since the AHA had their “totally financially unbiased” crusade against it in the 50s/60s.
Some of the longest living traditional/cultural groups are farmer / shepherd societies who definitely eat above the meager 25-30g the AHA suggests when they eat Fatty cuts of meat and fish, butter, eggs, and milk every single day, and also cook with tallow and lard.
So much of this depends on how your body reacts to and absorbs saturated fat, and how it produces cholesterol as a result. There’s certainly generalities you can use, but more than sat sat and cholesterol, the amount of sugar and other processed foods/chemicals/gums, etc you eat while eating those fats can help increase inflammation in the gut, and damage gut bacteria, and that has bad effects (diabetes is at least partly related to low grade inflammation, for example).
In the era of industrial and processed food, it’s never just as easy or simple as saying “this is good” or “this is bad for you”.
Unfortunately.
Depends on the context. Depends on the source.
If you’re obese and have fragile health from your shit eating and lifestyle.
Either way, the final analysis is that saturated fat from real food (avocado, healthy animal fat, butter, olive oil, coconut, nuts, etc) is completely fine. Even the cholesterol situation has proven to be false, it won’t contribute to your own cholesterol other than taking pressure off the body to have to synthetise it (meaning cholesterol is of benefit)
In a world where everyone is eating fake food and saying sugar and table salt in “moderation” the obvious answer to health is eating whole foods, eating animals AND plants, ignore the media bullshit that has made us fat and stupid, drink water, train, sleep.
In general, yes, they are unhealthy. The AHA dietary guidelines as well as the Dietary Guidelines of America 2020-2025 point this out for saturated fat. Dietary cholesterol is a little more complicated, but if you look at the medication Ezetimibe, that works by lowering dietary cholesterol, and it can help a bit.
Some people can be blessed with genetic mutations that allow them to eat high saturated fat and cholesterol but not have elevated LDL-C levels. In that case, then it isn’t unhealthy.
Seems like recent research, which does not appear to have been incorporated into medical recommendations, is to control small particle LDL but that large particle LDL does not pose a CVD risk. Here’s an article about that: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077 Personally, I would follow well-known healthy eating and lifestyle patterns vs betting my life on the latest thing I read.
Pretend that metabolic disease (high blood pressure, diabetes, excess abdominal fat,and so forth) is a fire and saturated fat is a can of fuel. Locked up safe the can of fuel is benign, but throw it into a fire and it makes matters much worse.
Saturated fat is fine for health individuals that don’t over consume calories. The issue comes in when you have unhealthy habbits that lead to metabolic disease. You don’t even have to be overweight to have insulin resistance, so body composition is a better indicator of health.
Dietary Cholesterol was once thought to effect blood cholesterol levels. Modern science has proven its effects to be negligible with saturated fat having a much bigger effect on blood cholesterol levels.
Recent research actually points to increased saturated fat intake increasing risk of diabetes…
While we need small amounts of saturated fat as part of a balanced meal, taking more than moderated amounts does carry risks for sure.
Only 15% of your total cholesterol comes from your food. So if you’re relatively fit and are are in your target range for cholesterol I really wouldn’t worry that much. However if you have had issues with your cholesterol in the past or are prone to having high cholesterol because of your genes, than diet and exercise are really the only natural ways you can help to bring those numbers down and thus avoiding foods high in cholesterol may be wise.
Just like with everything, dose makes the poison. Moderate amounts of either don’t hurt. Hell, alcohol I think most people will agree is unhealthy, but having one a day seems to have no negative side effects, despite being quite literally a poison.
There is a lot of debate recently, and that is great. Dr. Peter Attia has great content on cholesterol. Very interesting.
Don’t take it lightly. Coronary artery disease is the second biggest killer after smoking and still before cancer. Many people on Keto/Carnivore will have excellent blood work and health markers outside of LDL cholesterol.
It’s worth noting that 1 in 200 to 250 people have familial hypercholesterolemia, meaning genetically high cholesterol. Lifestyle changes will not bring their LDL cholesterol down and if untreated they have a 20 fold risk of coronary artery disease. Luckily statins are very effective and reduce their risk by 90%.
They are.
“But the poison is in the dose!”. Yeah but some poisons need way smaller doses while others are hardly a poison. Keep saturated fat below 10 % of your energy intake and cholesterol as low as possible. That’s what the dietary guidelines based on the best evidence say.
“Recent nutrition” can say chicken eggs are now wonderful and tomatoes make you grow interdigital webbing but that won’t make it true just because they said it one millisecond ago. We need good evidence, not just new evidence. And we have outstanding evidence, old and new, that shows how diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol make people ill and have made them for centuries.
It depends. Too much of anything is bad for you, but just as important is the origins and quality.Pasture raised animals will provide much healthier saturated fats than feed lot for example.Cholesterol isn’t a problem per se, it’s the ratio between ldl and hdl, and your total triglycerides that’s important.
If you want more info there’s plenty about but I’ve been busy for several years now collating it here https://healthhacker.com.au/?s=Saturated+fat
yeah sat fat is bad for you - with keto being trendy a lot of people are in denial about this.
afaik dietary cholesterol is NOT connected to blood cholesterol though, but I’m not sure about cholesterol’s impact on the heart.