Saturated fats are fine. They're necessary for creating testosterone, and they do raise HDL along with LDL (it's really the ratio between the two that counts). They're much more stable at high temps, like you said. I use coconut oil and butter for all my cooking. They won't give you atherosclerosis, either. From what I've read atherosclerosis has been seen in every culture with every different type of diet. It just happens, apparently. I prefer using saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats because there is a lot of evidence that they're really the ones that cause health issues (barring omega-3 supplementation). Check out the Weston A. Price Foundation (
http://www.westonaprice.org/) for lots of good information.
Whoa there. You are painting with very broad strokes of a brush here. In the first place it is impossible to completely avoid saturated fats short of going on a zero-fat diet, in which case you will die. Saturated fats are hardly "required" to make testosterone in the sense I think you are characterizing it. Yes, they do help provide copious amounts of acetyl-CoA which serves as a precursor to cholesterol, which then serves as the immediate "rough skeleton" for testosterone, but acetyl-CoA is a pretty ubiquitous molecule in biochemical reactions. There are other places your body can get it.
Saturated fats as a whole do raise HDL and LDL, but the story is more complicated than that. While the net effect may be a bump in both, certain saturated fats are associated with a LDL increase, others are associated with a HDL increase, and some are for all intents and purposes neutral. For example: one of the saturated fats believed to have some of the highest LDL-raising effect is palmitic acid. It so happens that it is also one of the most widely distributed saturated fats in the food supply, so there is good reason behind the advice to limit consumption of saturated fats to <10% (the AHA says <7%) of total daily calories.
Additionally...the use of cholesterol ratios is controversial in the medical community. As of right now the tendency is to look at the absolute numbers when making medical decisions, because there is a lot that a ratio can obscure. From a practice standpoint this makes more sense. So the actual numbers in a standard lipid panel (HDL, LDL, total cholesterol, triglycerides) matter, too - don't get carried away with ratios, because they obfuscate a lot: a LDL of 100 with a HDL of 20 carries the same ratio as a LDL of 500 with a HDL of 100. Judging by the ratio alone, you would perceive no difference, but there is clearly a clinically significant difference to the two pairs of numbers.
I would like to see this evidence that atherosclerosis "just happens," as I would also like to see the evidence that PUFA are the "ones caus[ing] health issues." Suggesting Weston A. Price foundation as a source of nutrition info is interesting, because they're a bit of a fringe group - their campaigns against the bans on raw milk and soy/vegetarianism/veganism are a bit out of the mainstream, I'd say.
To the OP: the material I have read touting consumption of saturated fats stop short of giving people carte blanche to start eating porterhouses topped with butter and bacon. They certainly imply it, which is probably a shrewd marketing move on their part, but it is not an explicit endorsement to go out of your way to increase your saturated fat intake. The main message is that they may not be a thing to "fear" so much. That said, this remains a fringe opinion that hasn't attracted the attention of many major public health organizations (CDC, WHO, IOM, etc.). We can sit here all day and hypothesize why, but I'm fairly certain it has something to do with the what I say - there are limited studies that support their conclusions and a larger body of evidence to support the current recommendations.
7% of calories from saturated fat is 15-16 g/day on a 2000 calorie diet, which translates to roughly three cups of whole milk, half a dozen extra-large eggs, etc. If you choose leaner, more basic foods (which are lower in calories anyway) you can actually stretch that allotment quite a bit. Of course, if you are someone who eats a mainly processed-food/fast food diet, you will probably hit that number after a half meal - and you are probably eating too many calories anyway.