I have a good -- or, depending on your appetite for large volumes of email, truly bad -- vantage point from which to observe both genuine and illusory controversies in nutrition. I am on a long list of list-servs and receive just about all the diet news that's fit to email.
Over recent months, a disproportionate volume of this traffic has been devoted to the exoneration, and at times, it seems, the canonization, of saturated fat.
In my view, this is one of the illusory nutrition controversies. Because the answers being espoused with ever greater passion and conviction are in response to the wrong question. The question being asked, it seems, is: Is saturated fat truly harmful? The right question is: Is all saturated fat created equal?
It is not. Saturated fat is not a compound, but a class of compounds. And we have long had strong indications that the class is home to both baby and bath water.
Before specifying the baby/bath water distinction and reaching actionable conclusions based on it, let's review the relevant history, for the usual reasons. The history of nutritional hyperbole is riddled with folly we would be well advised to learn from -- and avoid repeating.
In the beginning, dietary fat was all good. I do mean the beginning of our species, or as a recent proxy for it, the Stone Age. The best informed guesses of paleoanthropologists all point to the routine consumption by our many-times-over-great-grandparents of all the organ meats and bone marrow into which they could sink their teeth.
Why? There are, and have always been, only three macronutrient classes: fat, protein and carbohydrate. Carbohydrate provides four kcal per gram. Protein provides the same, or arguably, a bit less. Fat provides nine.
So for every gram of fat found and consumed, the caloric reward was more than twice that of the only alternatives. Since throughout most of human history, calories were relatively scarce and hard to get, a double dose was a true survival advantage. Survival imperatives, hard-wired into the Homo sapien hypothalamus, account for a prevailing penchant for dietary fat.
Why organ meats and bone marrow? Because fat was scarce just about every place else. There was some in nuts and seeds, and a bit in eggs. We may think of meat as a good source, but that's because the meat we eat today is the marbled muscle of domesticated animals, not the sinewy stuff of their wild forebears.
Turning again to the work of paleoanthropologists, they tell us that the meat we have eaten throughout most of our history was nothing like the meat we often eat today. For instance, beef from a modern, grain-fed steer may contain as much as 35 percent of its calories in fat, and much of that fat is saturated. In contrast, the flesh of antelope -- thought to be far more like the meat on which our species used to cut its teeth -- contains only about 7 percent of its calories in fat, almost all of which is unsaturated. And some of that fat is even omega-3.
While we tend now to refer to omega-3 oils as "fish oil," that's only because we have domesticated them out of other animals. Ungulates grazing on a diversity of wild grasses take in some alpha linolenic acid, and just like fish that get the same from algae and other sources, turn it into DHA and EPA. Modern fish-farming practices do at times, by the way, threaten a reduction or even elimination, of fish oil from fish. We are what we feed what we eat ...
But back to the Stone Age. Dietary fat was at a premium and highly valued. It was hard to get, rich in calories and an excess was not a threat -- nor even an option. Meat was lean, and until just 12,000 years ago at most, the only dairy that figured into the human diet was breast milk.
For quite a long time after the beginning, dietary fat stayed good. Right up to the pre-modern era, in fact, butter and cream were available to the affluent only, elusive for everyone else. Fat, when scarce, was a good thing -- just like calories.
But then like so much else in the modern era, dietary fat became mired in the perils of excess. Affluence and high-tech farming techniques converged to make access to fat easy and inexpensive for all. Then came ever more fried food, fast food and oil-containing processed foods. And then along came Ancel Keys, who looked out at all this and concluded that it was bad.
Keys, a researcher looking at cardiovascular disease in the 1950s, wasn't the only one with concerns about an excess of dietary fat, but he was among the earliest and most prominent to make his concerns public, most famously in the 7 Countries Study. Keys' work was then corroborated by William Castelli and the Framingham Study, and fat became public health enemy #1.
As advice about restricting dietary fat proliferated, so did obesity and diabetes. But this had nothing to do with cutting fat, because we never actually did so! Data from the NHANES trials show we just diluted fat as a percent of total calories by eating ever more questionable carbohydrates! While a return to more plant-based eating might well have yielded the public health benefits the anti-fat faction was seeking, our collective turn to Snackwell cookies certainly did not!
And so along came Atkins, to tell us that fat had never been the problem in the first place -- the problem was carbohydrate. Atkins, of course, went further, suggesting that all fat was fine, and the more the better. The image with which his rise to stratospheric fame is most indelibly associated is a fatty pork chop adorned with a large pat of butter.
But, of course, Atkins ignored the fact that everything from lentils to lollipops is made of carbohydrate -- and that both salmon and salami are fatty, but hardly the same. He turned a blind eye on studies suggesting harms of saturated fat. His advice, for the health of people and planet, was seriously misguided.
At this point, one might argue that things began to improve. We started to recognize and acknowledge that some fats were beneficial, prominent among them monounsaturated fat and omega-3 fat; and some clearly harmful, notably trans fat and -- it seemed -- saturated fat. We started to see some attention to the fact that not all carbohydrate is created equal, either.
But we now find ourselves on the brink of more folly, as our penchant for all-or-none, active ingredient, silver-bullet scenarios wins out over vast experience with truth in shades of gray.
This is where the effort to exonerate saturated fat resides. We do, indeed, have evidence that saturated fat is not, and never was, our lone dietary peril. Excesses of calories, sugar, refined starch, sodium and trans fats -- among others -- share in that indictment.
But more importantly, we have evidence that not all saturated fat is created equal.
Stearic acid is a long saturated fat molecule and seems to exert no harmful effects. It is one of the fats found in meat and the predominant saturated fat found in dark chocolate. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee very reasonably recommended that when we speak of restricting saturated fat intake, stearic acid need not be included.
There is less, but increasing evidence that lauric acid -- a very short saturated fat molecule -- may also be innocuous. It is the kind of saturated fat that predominates in coconut oil -- and the reason why the jury is still out on the health effects of its use.
I consider the evidence strong that palmitic and myristic acids, two of the commonly consumed saturated fats, are, indeed, potentially harmful, contributing to inflammation, elevated lipids, atherogenesis and vascular disease.
Note that even the exonerated SFAs appear to be harmless, rather than health-promoting per se. Nowhere in any of the evolving science is there a basis for the active promotion of saturated fat intake, which I am nonetheless hearing from certain quarters.
Now for three key points before we cross the finish line. First, we have innumerable studies showing that saturated fats -- notably palmitic and myristic acids which are found in dairy, meat and many processed foods -- can increase blood lipids and contribute to inflammation. While it's true that such fats may tend to raise HDL along with LDL, recent research raises questions about whether that's the benefit it appeared to be. And while it's also true that an excess of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats, and/or a deficiency of omega-3s can contribute to inflammation, that doesn't mean that saturated fats don't! It also seems likely that harms of saturated fat are very much compounded by the company they keep. Processed meat, for instance, is more clearly linked to bad health outcomes than just plain beef or pork.
Second, all oils are a mix of fatty acid types. While we think of olive oil as monounsaturated, it in fact contains monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fatty acids. Oleic acid, a monounsaturate, merely predominates. Since oils and foods contain a mix of fatty acids, we are almost never making pure comparisons of one type of fat to another, and for this reason, we might expect to see some overlap in health effects. Consider that if olive oil is good for health, there is a bit of saturated fat caught up in that conclusion. In the real world, "all good" vs. "all bad" is reliably more about salesmanship than data.
Third, and most important, we have very compelling evidence regarding the kinds of foods and diets that are associated with reduced risk of premature death and chronic disease -- and they are not diets high in saturated fat! The Lyon Diet Heart Study compared a Mediterranean-style diet rich in monounsaturated fats to a "typical French" diet much richer in saturated fat among people who had had a first heart attack. The rate of second heart attack was 70 percent lower among those on the Mediterranean diet! So much for the French paradox. The same results have been achieved on a plant-based diet, very low in total fat. No such results have ever been seen with any diet high in saturated fat.
Dietary fat was never all good or all bad; carbohydrate was never all good or all bad; and saturated fat is not now all good after having formerly been all bad. It depends on the specifics, which in turn depend on the foods you choose.
Choose wisely -- foods close to nature, mostly plants -- and you will avoid a host of ills, from the wrong kinds of fat, to excesses of sugar, salt, starch and calories. By choosing wholesome foods, you construct a wholesome diet -- with a good chance of adding both years to your life and life to your years. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, walnuts, almonds, lentils, beans, seeds, olives, avocados and fish are all among the foods most decisively recommended for health promotion and all are low in saturated fat. That is by no means their only virtue, but it is among them.
While the science has moved incrementally into the realm of subtleties, we have remained mired in pop-culture fickleness about nutrition. But look around, and you will see what a fat lot of good it has done us to fall in and out of love with entire macronutrient classes!
Shifting that silliness to sub-classes, such as saturated fat, will do us no more good -- so let's not. Instead, let's learn from the follies of nutritional history and avoid repeating them.
-fin
Dr. David L. Katz; www.davidkatzmd.com
www.turnthetidefoundation.org
Author, Nutrition in Clinical Practice, 2nd Edition
Follow David Katz, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrDavidKatz
Good Fats/Bad Fats: Health Benefits of Omega-3 Fats
7 Reasons to Eat More Saturated Fat
Fat Nutrition - Nutrition, Function, Side Effects - NY Times ...
Dow AgroSciences Announces the First Saturated Fat Free Oil Product
As for Ancel Keys, you should know that he deliberately fudged his data to fit his hypothesis. If he tried doing that today he would be drummed out of science.
My overweight and pimply doctor thought me crazy, so I broke up with his fat glutenous *ss!
I googled pre-modern era and found that most sites said that the modern era started about 1500. While the rich may have had cattle, the less affluent had sheep and goats and you can get butter and cream, milk, cheeses and yogurts.
My hypothesis is that there is one particular diet that all humans originally evolved to eat (The Original Diet), just as other living species have evolved to eat a particular diet to keep them healthy. Note that the previous sentence does not state that there is only one diet for each human individual that must be followed to produce health. In fact, there may be more than one diet each person can adopt that will yield an illness-free life, or not. The trick is to guess which other one, if any, might work for you. The results may not be known for decades, and the penalty for guessing wrong could be serious.
Relying on diet studies of what has worked for others says nothing about how that diet may or may not work for you. If you could trace, with a great deal of certainty, your lineage on both sides of your family over many generations to a particular monolithic society somewhere in the world, and you knew their traditional diet, and they lived healthy lives, it might be safe to assume you could follow that diet without compromising your health. Otherwise, place your bets with care.
Roy Mankovitz, Director
Montecito Wellness
A research organization
My Italian grandfather who lived to 96 walked 1 mile uphill every day to his vineyard and orchard that supplied his table w/ wonderful tasting fresh foods and ate pasta daily - he was never overweight..
My cousins now eat a very similiar diet however they take the car to their orchard and are overweight...personally I think they could use less pasta
The fat profile of paleolithic meat is very different than the fat profile of modern cattle which are a neolithic creation just like wheat and other grains. Comparing Inuit marine mammal fat to a cow eater diet is silly. Masai had cardiovascular disease but no events, they ate high n-3 meat, exercised, and consumed dairy with plant tonics/elixers. Also, it's a myth that paleolithic eaters had access to large percentages of saturated fat in their diet on a consistent basis. They certainly consumed saturated fat, but nothing approaching the amounts or percentages that we see in the low carb/high fat diet of some paleo and low carb eaters. Here's a 14 year Paleo eater and blogger who blew up the the high fat diet myth. Read the compelling series.
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-said-paleo-diet-had-high-fat.html
Certainly felt better on thyroxine, but still much under par, no energy, no ambition etc.. Local newsagent searching for something to read "The Super Energy Diet Book" by Dr. Robert Atkins, still treasure it. Off to the local Health Food store, which until that day were avoided like the plague. Purchased around fifty dollars of vitamin and mineral pills and diligently applied Dr Atkins diet.
within a week a dramatic improvement because I had undiagnosed "hypoglycaemia".
Dietarilly back to the way I used to eat before the well balanced diet.
That was 76, continued to improve in all aspects of health of mind, body and spirit and have achieved more than I could have imagined including a grateful twenty seven thousand and still counting, patients.
You are all welcome to a Free copy of my E-Book" Functional Medicine" including the Myth of the Balanced Diet.(eighty pages) email: functionmed@gmail.com
Inhabiting this planet almost 81 years and growing up on a diet high in bread and beef dripping for the first thirteen years walking everywhere, still consuming eggs, beef, lamb, every day and with high cholesterol by your criteria, with a mind/brain function better than ever, be assured you are the victim of the biggest and most deadly nutrition fraud ever promulgated by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture, as the "Well Balanced Diet" with 60% carb's. It has killed more people than any other factor in modern history. It is a big fat lie. Do you homework doctor and find that sat fats are now completely vindicated by a very large meta analysis study in the latest BMJ.
Until the 1950's on you would rarely encounter an obese person.
Geoffrey Leigh.,MSc.,ND.,D.N.Sc..
Clinical Director
Australian Institute of Biological Medicine
(non-profit)
My vote is for Coconut Oil, a great MCT oil. My other vote is for saturated fat from grass-fed animals.
I'm not sure how losing weight, lowering blood pressure, lowering triglycerides, and lowering blood glucose and A1C is bad -- which is the result from eliminating carbs and increasing "good" saturated fat.
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You'll be branded a blasphemer if you keep up that talk...!
The olive oil industry has an answer for you on this, as well as those who just get tickled pink eating the stuff. Don't get me wrong, I like it - but that doesn't make it good for me.
Sorry to go off on a tangent.
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I think you've partially answered your own question. Regardless of whether we "evolve[d] eating olive oil," it can be an excellent source of dietary fats if it's of good quality (expeller-pressed, organic EVOO most notably), although I do use lesser quality for frying and sauteeing admittedly. Point being, there's a lot of bad olive oil out there, and it's not all of equal quality.
It does seem to be something that you can taste the difference in, however. If you've ever done an olive oil tasting, the cooking-grade oil tastes like... well, cooking-grade oil. It may still have a better nutritional profile than vegetable oils, but I'd use it for its purpose only.
And I don't think that simply increasing the volume of oil because it's considered healthful is a good idea: use a reasonable amount in normal preparations, rather than drinking a cup of olive oil for its own sake. Over-consumption of what we are told is good for us, in misbegotten attempts to boost particular nutrients, rather than eating a balanced, traditional diet, seems to miss the point.
"After watching the documentary Religulous
(melding of "religion" and "ridiculous) yesterday, it dawned upon me how much some religious fundamentalists have in common with certain nutritional fundamentalists. In recent years, I have seen the rise of one group in particular. I prefer to call them the low carb talibans."
http://www.leangains.com/2009/02/low-carb-talibans.html
Alas, Castelli isn't the first director of the Framingham Study who chose dogma over data. His predecessor also refused to accept the possibility that the anti-fat/anti-cholesterol hypothesisis was wrong.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cardiovascular-disease/framingham-follies/
On a positive note, there is one former director of the Framingham Study who had the courage to toss dogma in the compost heap and follow the data. George V. Mann once said, "“The diet-heart hypothesis that high intake of saturated fat and cholesterol causes heart disease has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, yet for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fundraising enterprises, food companies, and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.”
The Importance of Saturated Fats for Biological Functions
http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/528-importance-of-saturated-fats-for-biological-functions
Palmitic and Stearic Acids
http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/1369-some-recent-studies-on-fats
On the issue of “compelling evidence regarding the kinds of foods and diets that are associated with reduced risk of premature death and chronic disease,” as the author pointed out, the diet nature evolved humans to eat was loaded with pastured animal foods, with a preference for parts high in saturated fat.
Saturated fat has been a staple of the human diet for about 2.49 million years (say 99,400 generations), the longest “clinical trial” of any diet. It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence than that, unless you believe nature evolved us to eat a diet meant to promote premature death and chronic illness.
On the other hand, the diets promoted by the various “diet gurus” of today are quite recent in our history, and the results have been a disaster – we now lead long, sickly lives. Some anecdotal evidence has shown that while lifespan has increased, healthspan (the average number of years without any chronic illness) has actually decreased, and is about 48 years.
Roy Mankovitz, Director
Montecito Wellness
A research organization
There seems to be no way to broach a consensus among them.
As I state repeatedly in my books, I am convinced there is a subset of the population that can eat nothing but Twinkies and Coke and live to be 110 in perfect health, while smoking, having a mouth full of mercury fillings, and living and working in toxic environments.
The trick, of course, is to match the individual to the correct diet. As I posted above, that is not necessarily an easy feat, unless you opt for the original diet, designed by nature.