Popular Belief That Saturated Fat Clogs Up Arteries Is a Myth, Experts Say (independent.ie)

schwit1 quotes a report from Irish Independent: The authors, led by Dr Aseem Malhotra, from Lister Hospital, Stevenage, wrote: "Despite popular belief among doctors and the public, the conceptual model of dietary saturated fat clogging a pipe is just plain wrong." Dr Malhotra and colleagues Professor Rita Redberg, from the University of California at San Francisco, and Pascal Meier from University Hospital Geneva in Switzerland and University College London, cited a "landmark" review of evidence that appeared to exonerate saturated fat. They said relative levels of "good" cholesterol, or high density lipoprotein (HDL), were a better predictor of heart disease risk than levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL), also known as "bad" cholesterol. High consumption of foods rich in saturated fat such as butter, cakes and fatty meat has been shown to increase blood levels of LDL. The experts wrote: "It is time to shift the public health message in the prevention and treatment of coronary artery disease away from measuring serum lipids (blood fats) and reducing dietary saturated fat. "Coronary artery disease is a chronic inflammatory disease and it can be reduced effectively by walking 22 minutes a day and eating real food." They pointed out that in clinical trials widening narrow arteries with stents -- stainless steel mesh devices -- failed to reduce the risk of heart attacks.

Comments

Re:No.

[Aighearach]

I think it was only yesterday I saw another headline saying that salt doesn't cause high blood pressure - despite the fact that the connection is very well established.

Sorry Bozo, it was always true that salt increases blood pressure in a minority of patients with a particular genetic predisposition to that response. The average patient with hypertension has a very very minimal increase in blood pressure from dietary salt intake, and reducing it in those patients does not improve any of their hypertension-related outcomes. The reason that diuretics lower blood pressure is primarily because they alter the level of salt that your body maintains. Most people's bodies are well able to maintain a fairly steady body fluid salt level regardless of dietary intake.

The reason you don't know this might be that some researchers publicly accuse people of being murderers for explaining that! Because they fear some ignorant person who didn't get tested will be affected and not go to a doctor to test and then die. This is the nonsense that people face in trying to get medical information generally.

Re: We scientists must improve our reliability.

[guruevi]

That's largely because there is neither fame nor money in peer review. Peer review IS being done though, at least in the harder sciences, many studies that build on other studies will at least attempt to verify the original results. Only when they see large discrepancies will they ever be further reviewed and published and then only if the original paper has been of quite some impact to the field (hundreds or thousands of references to the paper).

Things like this has been known to the scientific community for a while, the models used to communicate the impact of fats and food on your health to the public are just way too simplistic. It's not just about fats, it's what you eat/drink with those fats. The food pyramid is one of those things that has been known to be false soon after it was introduced but even the food plate is way too simplistic and unrealistic.

Everything you eat (fat, sugar, alcohol, acids etc) has an impact on each other, the French classical diet of "du vin, du pain et du Boursin" (wine, bread and cheese or alcohol, gluten and fat) does not result in fat Frenchmen even though every doctor will tell you it will blow you up like a balloon.