Bacon, butter now good for your health
SATURATED fat has long been demonised by doctors and nutritionists, who claim that it increases the risk of heart problems.
But decades of official advice may need to be altered, after new research suggested that it may be safe to eat up to three times the maximum amount recommended by the UK’s National Health Service. It means that far from being foods to avoid, butter, cheese, meat and cream could all form part of a healthy lifestyle.
NHS advice is unequivocal on saturated fat, with guidance stating that it raises the level of cholesterol in the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.
But when researchers at Ohio State University asked volunteers to try different diets, they found that raising the intake of saturated fat did not increase fat in the blood. It seems that the body burns up saturated fat quickly as energy.
In contrast, when the level of carbohydrate was raised, dangerous fatty acids did increase in the bloodstream. These have been linked to type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The findings “challenge the conventional wisdom that has demonised saturated fat”, said senior author Jeff Volek, professor of human sciences at Ohio State University.
“When you consume a very low- carb diet, your body preferentially burns saturated fat. We had people eat two times more saturated fat than they had been eating before entering the study, yet when we measured saturated fat in their blood, it went down in the majority of people. Other traditional risk markers improved as well.”
NHS guidelines state that the average man should eat no more than 30g of saturated fat a day, and the average woman no more than 20g.
The team, whose results appear in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, conducted a “metaanalysis” of data from 72 studies involving more than 600 000 participants from 18 countries.
A key finding was that total saturated fat, whether measured in the diet or the bloodstream, showed no association with heart disease.
The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE. — © The