saturated fat = good?

"Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat -- about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease."

Interestingly enough, the fact that increased saturated fat intake leads to heart disease is not even a fact, but a hypothesis, and an unsupported one at that. The first propaganda against saturated fats were published in 1953, comparing the fat consumption to heart disease ratio of just six countries. Mind you, there are over 200 countries on the planet Earth, so a six is an insignificant sample size. In 1957, Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, looked at the same statistics for 22 countries, and found that the supposed fat-to-heart-disease link disappeared with a larger sample size. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.

Where does it all come together? Here's the connection: Dr. Krauss, an adjunct professor of nutritional sciences at the University of California at Berkeley -- has been studying the effect of diet and blood lipids on cardiovascular disease for 30 years, found that when people replace the carbohydrates in their diet with fat--saturated or unsaturated -- the number of small, dense LDL particles decreases. This leads to the highly counterintuitive notion that replacing your breakfast cereal with eggs and bacon could actually reduce your risk of heart disease.

So perhaps it is the carbs, or sugars, in our diets that have lead to the decline of our health as a nation. The low-fat-diet-crowd may disagree, but I find the evidence compelling. Consider that since the 70's, an era when high-fructose corn-syrup was introduced to the American diet, and the low-fat diet hypothesis was pushed upon us by the FDA, the obesity rate in America has skyrocketed, despite the advents of sugar substitutes and low-calorie processed foods.

I suggest that you consider reading the labels on your foods. If you don't immediately recognize an ingredient, you may want to think twice before putting it into your or your children's mouths.

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