I just watched this video by Brenda Davis RD indicating why people should reduce butter & saturated fat consumption and specifically talking about the studies which came out saying that butter was okay again.
I would be very interested in comments for and against the message in this video. I shows the importance of not just accepting studies and how results can be very seriously skewed to produce the story you want to tell.
The talk points out that if you compare someone with a 14% saturated fat intake and compare that with someone at 16% saturated fat intake you will see little difference. And that that is one major problem with these studies.
It goes on to point out if you look at the Epic Oxford study and compare veggies vs omnivores there was a 2.77 greater risk of cardio vascular disease. An important note here is the omnivores were not people eating standard meat, but people choosing quality meat options.
It includes comments from one the contributors to the second paper about how the initial findings of the second paper were rejected when it went for publication and had to be reworked to show "something new." I am not sure quite what to make of this. I think the talk is trying to argue that in order to get the paper accepted for publication the headline conclusion needed to say something new and so the evidence in the research was cherry-picked to skew results.
Looking thus at what the american college of cardiology and the american heart association recommend... 5% saturated fat. And asks the question how do you get down to 5% saturated fat whilst eating anything other than a plant-based diet. I think you might just achieve it if you limit yourself to one very small portion of animal product once a week.
That summarises the first half of the talk. The rest of the talk moves onto the evidence for the benefits of a whole food plant based dietary approach. If you do not accept the analysis in the first half then the second half is probably a waste of time for you.
As I say I think this talk provides a clear analysis that argues why reports showing saturated fat is good for you are based on poor scientific method and poor publication process.
Written by
andyswarbs
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There are not "two studies" that vindicate saturated fat. There are hundreds.
People have been following the same tired old advice about PUFAs, low-fat, 'whole grains' etc. They've followed the advice to the letter; in fact people now feel visceral guilt if they don't. And yet heart disease has shot through the roof. Almost the entire population of the UK is now on statins ... with no actual positive results to show for it. So there's clearly something wrong with the official advice.
My main beef with the advice is that both PUFAs and 'whole grains' are a product of modern technology. It seems incredibly unlikely that something that humans have never eaten before in their entire evolutionary history (at least not in the recommended quantities) should be good for you. As per Sagan's dictum: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
To be clear: most PUFAs require complex extraction processes. They would have been nothing more than a curiosity 100 years ago; they certainly wouldn't have been cheap enough for routine cooking. The Canola plant is the result of a genetic selection procedure that our ancestors wouldn't have been able to carry out. Grains, despite the massive application of modern technology and subsidy, are STILL not economically viable. Historically, they were a luxury: that's why people aspired to eat white bread (it was originally something only the landed gentry could afford). Large quantities of these things are dietary aberrations.
Saturated fats, on the other hand, have always been abundant and easy to produce using natural methods. Lard. Butter. Coconut oil. People have eaten them for millennia. Again, it would be incredibly surprising to find that something that's been with us for our entire evolutionary history should turn out to be bad for us.
Also worth mentioning that unsaturated fats are known to degrade into dangerous (carcinogenic) products at high temperatures. That plastic-y stuff that you have to scrape off the back of your hob now and then? You're eating that, you know. Saturated fats don't do that: they're very stable at high temperatures.
The problem with most dietary studies is this: they simply refuse to contemplate any radical modification away from the "balanced" model. LCHF is dismissed out-of-hand because it's "known to be dangerous". As I've mentioned before, when you reduce things like whole grains and starchy vegetables to a level which would have been economically viable under 'natural' conditions, your whole metabolism changes radically. Saturated fats are just burned for energy. The biochemistry behind this is understood in detail.
As for that 5%-fat figure: no known culture eats like that as a deliberate choice. A diet with 5% fat represents poverty food. It will leave you hungry, miserable, malnourished, and most likely fat. We're talking here about woo-woo religion, not science.
I think she was replying to the basis of that specific report which is why she limited her discussion to those two.
I'd love to see evidence of typical 5% fat populations suffering from chronic conditions the way modern society is.
Yes there are people who do not have access to insufficient foods, and some of these are in "developing" countries. Part of the reason for that lack of food access is increasingly because land is being devoted to farming cows and other animals where the food is destined for advanced societies rather than for local consumption.
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Homemade peanut butter
