Good fats, bad fats: chew on this

LONDON: The media love manbites-dog stories that purport to debunk long-established beliefs and advice.

Among the most popular on the health front are reports that saturated fats do not cause heart disease and that the vegetable oils we’ve been encouraged to use instead may actually promote it.

But the best-established facts on dietary fats say otherwise. How well polyunsaturated vegetable oils hold up health-wise when matched against saturated fats such as butter, beef fat, lard and even coconut oil depends on the quality, size and length of the studies and what foods are eaten when fewer saturated fats are consumed.

So before you succumb to wishful thinking that you can eat pork ribs and full-fat dairy products with abandon, consider the findings of what is probably the most comprehensive, commercially untainted review of the dietary fat literature yet published. They are in an advisory prepared for the American Heart Association and published by experts led by Dr Frank M Sacks, professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

The report helps explain why the campaign to curb cardiovascular disease by steering the American diet away from animal fats has been less successful than it might have been and inadvertently promoted expanding waistlines and Type 2 diabetes.

When people cut back on a particular nutrient, they usually replace it with something else to maintain their needed caloric input. Unfortunately, in too many cases, saturated fats – and fats in general – gave way to refined carbohydrates and sugars.

Still, people do miss their unhealthy fats and, in the latest rage, many have latched on to coconut oil in the mistaken belief that its main highly saturated fat, lauric acid, and other nutrients can enhance health.

As documented in the new advisory, misleading conclusions that saturated fats do not affect the risk of developing and dying from cardiovascular diseases have largely resulted from studies done in good faith that failed to take into account what people who avoided saturated fats ate in their place.

The most recent studies conducted that analysed the effects of specific nutrients showed that when 5% of calories from saturated fats were replaced by an equal number of calories from polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats (such as olive and canola oils) or wholegrain carbohydrates, the risk of coronary heart disease was reduced respectively by 25%, 15% and 9%.

Focus on a Mediterranean-style diet heavy on plant foods and unsaturated vegetable oils, with whole grains. – New York Times