The definitive guide to saturated fat (or how to stop worrying and love butter)

I love the idea of a boards-based study btw, however it would need to have about 50 people per arm to be adequately powered (year long, based on LDL, HDL, trigs and Lp(a)). I doubt I convince that many people to take my word for it that saturated fat is good for you

If you think that this forum is full of people who all happen to think saturated fat isn't bad for you, then think again. The small level of consensus we do have was battled out over many a multi-page debate. And as you are now, each poster was asked to provide a high level of evidence (human and more than a single case report) and to this date there hasn't been anything overwhelming cited.

You seem to imply that I am closed-minded, honestly I'm not, I have changed my mind about lots of things and I'll change my mind again. But do trust that this has been my pet research project for four years now. Once my master's thesis is done I'd like to give a talk to a few medical classes and strike up debate. Because seriously, once you start looking into the history of how this recommendation came to be, how this was decided by fraudulent science and politics rather than any quest for truth, you start to become pretty much set upon correcting people who have been duped and misled.

I can see from a litigation point of view how you are required to be conservative. But with so little evidence against saturated fat given the bias against it, it's wholly plausible that reducing it has unknown and possibly harmful consequences. In which case, how can you justify an intervention based on inadequate evidence? That is not evidence-based medicine.

You are the type of person I am trying to convince. I am simply an anonymous person on the internet but you have the ability to change people's lives for good or bad based on your advice. If it were me, I'd want to be sure the advice I was giving out was based on sound evidence.

Orla K wrote: »

I'm just wondering, when you say 'may help' I get the impression that it's not proven yet, is that what you ment by may?

All the evidence is in mice and rat studies at the moment, hence my hesitance to say 'will help'.

Go_Long wrote: »

That seems reasonable - What about the cell membrane composition though? Rosedale suggests that if you consume saturated fat, "it will often end up in your cell membranes" which can lead to nutrients circulating in your bloodstream instead of getting into the cells which can be "in some cases harmful" - Is this something worth worrying about? Intuitively it sounds like a nice, permeable cell membrane would be very important..

I'd like to see the evidence that a diet higher in saturated fat leads to a higher level of saturated fat in cell membranes. I haven't seen any.

Nutrition scientists often confuse the effects of molecules as internal metabolites with their effect as an ingested food. The body doesn't just dump what goes into the mouth right into the cells. We have a very complex metabolism for a very good reason.

We can very easily desaturate any sat fat with enzymes to produce a monounsaturated fat. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think those enzymes are produced again in the liver. Once again I advise people to look after your liver, and it will look after you.

Trans fats on the other hand, your body has no enzymes for (as artificially produced trans fats have a novel chemical structure that our body has no idea what to do with) and these WILL end up as part of the cell membrane and cause all manner of havoc in cell signalling.

I hope that explains things!

Honestly, I don't know.

We know that omega 6 in the form of vegatable oil is bad for you, but we know that the fructose in refined sugar is bad for you. But take fructose in a whole food like fruit and you get improved health, not worse.

That's the problem with nutrition science is far too reductionist, taking components of food out of isolation and they seem to lose some of the original properties.

Generally the science on nuts is positive. But that's comparing eating nuts to eating junk food so anything would be an improvement.

We'll have to see when further research is out, but until the meantime I do try and minimise my n6 intake no matter the source to emulate populations with very low heart disease. If it's a choice between nuts and processed food though (which happens sometimes when trying to get food when travelling) then nuts are the clear winner.