Saturated Fat and Cholesterol

This fear of saturated fat and the argument that is still held out against it is that it tends to raise your LDL cholesterol, which is known as your bad cholesterol. It can be a transient rise, it can be a permanent rise. But what this paper points out is that the rise in lowering your LDL cholesterol through diet in diet studies has never been shown to lead to any impact on heart disease. It may happen that it works with drugs. You know, when you take statins, that's what statins are designed to do in part, but it really has never been shown to be reliably true if you do that through diet. So, and saturated fat raises a kind of LDL cholesterol that is called your large and boy, there are different kinds of LDL cholesterol. It becomes a complicated story, but it doesn't raise the type of LDL cholesterol or LDL particles that are considered the worst for heart disease. Those are small dense ones. Saturated fat tends to raise the large buoyant ones. So that was a one important point of the paper. I think two other important points is that this paper reviewed those clinical trials like everybody else did and said no effect on cardiovascular mortality and no effect on total mortality. That was the result of those paper, those clinical trials. And this paper said, I think really importantly, We have to be careful of restricting saturated fats because of the foods in which we find them. And you take potential harm if you restrict these foods like, you know, all kind of meat and full fat dairy and cheese and, you know, coconut oil or coconut butter or dark chocolate is another example. You are missing out on the nutrients, needed nutrients in those foods.