Yet more evidence that saturated fat is not the health devil we’ve been lead to believe it is. Ah, but carbohydrates …
While perusing Facebook, I noticed Nina Teicholz, author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” had a link to a story on the results of a new study.
The people participating in the study — which was published late last week in the scientific journal PLOS ONE — all ate the same meals each day for 18 weeks.
The regimen started with 47 grams of carbs and 84 grams of saturated fat each day, and ended with 346 carb grams per day and 32 grams daily of saturated fat.
Oh, and for you obsessed with calories, know that they ate the same amount of them (2,500 daily) throughout.
Basically, the study shows that doubling or even tripling the amount of saturated fat in a person’s diet doesn’t bring about an increase in saturated fatty acids in the blood. (Saturated fatty acids are suspected of putting people at a greater risk for heart disease.)
However, this same study found that increasing carbohydrates — that would be your pastas, breads, sweets, grains, you know, the foods the “experts” told us to eat instead of bacon, cheese, eggs — in a person’s diet brought a spike in palmitoleic, a fatty acid that is linked to increasing a person’s risk for diabetes and heart disease.
Jeff Volek, a professor of human sciences at the Ohio State University, is the lead author of the study, In a statement on the Ohio State website, he said the finding “challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn’t correlate with disease.”
This means more to you than being able to eat bacon daily without guilt. This is happening at the same time that the nutrition gods are reworking the dietary guidelines. And what does it look like they are they trying to do? Insist we eat even less saturated fat than we did before. I wrote about that here.
Crazy, isn’t it?
