I've written many times in the last couple years about the mistaken beliefs in society about saturated fat and the false perception in the media AND with
MOST health professionals that saturated fat is bad for you.
If you've seen in some of my articles, I've even showed you why saturated fat can even be GOOD for you in some cases, despite every health/fitness
professional in the world just accepting the false belief that it's bad for you.
Note - I'm NOT saying that an "Atkins style" diet is good for you! Atkins is NOT a healthy or balanced way to eat! Atkins typically promotes
processed meats full of nitrates, nitrites, excess salt, and imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratios (since most grocery store meats are grain fed and not raised in a
healthy manner). Also, Atkins plans typically have a lack of many other important food groups, nutrients, and antioxidants.
Rather, what you'll see in this article, is that saturated fat is a perfectly natural part of the human diet and has been for eternity... it is NOT the
evil demon it has been made out to be!
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to FINALLY see a big name publisher have some guts to publish an article about why everyone in the world may be
wrong about their beliefs about saturated fat.
I picked up a new issue of Men's Health magazine over the weekend, and they have a huge 6-page article in there about the faulty research in the past
about saturated fat, and some new emerging research that is showing why it may actually be more good for you than you would believe.
I've got to give them credit... the article was VERY well researched and put together beautifully to summarize where the studies in the past have gone
wrong, and why recent studies are showing that everyone may have been wrong for the last 5 decades about saturated fat.
I'd highly suggest you read the entire article if you can. If not, I'm going to try to give you a quick summary of the findings here since it was a long
article...
First of all, did you realize that although doctors, nutritionists, fitness professionals, and the media all have told you that it's a FACT that
saturated fats are bad for you, this "FACT" has actually never been proven!
It's actually not a "fact" at all. It was a
hypothesis! This goes all the way back to a flawed research study from the 1950's where a guy named
Ancel Keys published a paper that laid the blame on dietary fat intake for the increasing heart disease phenomenon.
However, there were major flaws to his study. For one, in his conclusions he only used data from a small portion of the countries where data was
available on fat consumption vs heart disease death rate. When researches have gone back in and looked at the data from all of the countries, there actually was no link
between fat consumption and heart disease deaths. So his conclusions were actually false.
Second, his blaming of fat intake for heart disease was only one factor that was considered. There was no consideration of other factors such as smoking
rates, stress factors, sugar intake, exercise frequency, or other lifestyle factors.
Basically, his conclusions which blamed heart disease deaths on fat intake were really just a shot in the dark about what a possible cause may have been,
even though all of those other factors I just mentioned, plus many others, may be the bigger cause.
Unfortunately, Keys study has been cited for over 5 decades now as "fact" that saturated fat is bad for you. As you can see, there certainly is nothing
factual about it.
Since that time, numerous other studies have been conducted trying to link saturated fat intake to heart disease. The majority of these studies have
failed to correlate ANY risk at all from saturated fat. A couple of them made feeble attempts at linking saturated fat to heart disease, however, it was later shown that
in those studies, the data was flawed as well.
Another issue with flawed studies is that many studies have lumped artificial trans fat intake together with saturated fat intake, and mistakenly laid
the blame on saturated fat despite the overwhelming evidence that artificial trans fat is the REAL health risk. This is a HUGE mistake as there is a vast difference in
how your body processes nasty artificially created trans fats vs the perfectly natural saturated fats that have been part of the human diet since the beginning of man.
Do we actually have evidence that saturated fat may actually be good for you instead?
Well, let's consider a few examples...
Did you know that there are several well known tribes in Africa... the Masai, Samburu, and Fulani tribes... where their diet consists mostly of raw
(unpasteurized) whole milk, tons of red meat, and cows blood? The typical members of these tribes eat
5x the average amount of saturated fat compared to
overweight, disease-ridden Americans.