saturated fat?

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lefenzy

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Nov 30, 2004
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Based on what I've read and what doctors recommend, I thought that while dietary cholesterol does not impact blood cholesterol levels, eating saturated fats raises blood cholesterol levels, and they are therefore unhealthy. But very recently, I've read online that this lipid hypothesis that implicated high fat diets in causing atherosclerosis hasn't been proven. Some sources say saturated fats are healthy, perhaps even healthier than unsaturated fats because they are more stable at high temperatures. Saturated fats just have single bonded carbons only; I can't see how that makes saturated fats damaging to health, which leads me to wonder if people should be cutting consumption of saturated fats (when input calories ~ daily usage). These sources that say saturated fats are healthy also contend that saturated fat raises both HDL and LDL, but raises HDL more than LDL.

But these are just websites on the internet and books written by naysayers. Eating a diet high in saturated fats would go against common medical recommendations. So just who is right here?
 

Deeko

Lifer
Jun 16, 2000
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Your body does need *some* saturated fats. Frankly, you don't need to worry about totally eliminated either of them. If you are moderate about your fat intake, you'll be fine either way.
 

spamsk8r

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Jul 11, 2001
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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.
 

gar655

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Mar 4, 2008
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You can have saturated fats without cholesterol and cholesterol without fat. The two are not really inter related. Coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, avacados all have a lot of saturated fat and of course no cholesterol. Shrimp in particular has virtually no fat but is high in cholesterol. And eating large quantities of cholesterol rich foods most likely will raise your blood cholesterol levels- it did mine.
 
Mar 22, 2002
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You can have saturated fats without cholesterol and cholesterol without fat. The two are not really inter related. Coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, avacados all have a lot of saturated fat and of course no cholesterol. Shrimp in particular has virtually no fat but is high in cholesterol. And eating large quantities of cholesterol rich foods most likely will raise your blood cholesterol levels- it did mine.

Research has shown that dietary cholesterol minimally or does not affect serum cholesterol levels. You may have had other factors that increased your cholesterol - poor general diet, high sugar intake, low unsaturated fat intake (or high unsaturated fat intake), high saturated fat intake, etc. You can't blame the cholesterol for your increase. Also what do you mean by "rich food?" Rich food often refers to food that fills you quickly and is high in saturated fat due to cream, butter, lard, etc.
 
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Kipper

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Feb 18, 2000
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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.
 

Kipper

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Feb 18, 2000
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You can have saturated fats without cholesterol and cholesterol without fat. The two are not really inter related. Coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, avacados all have a lot of saturated fat and of course no cholesterol. Shrimp in particular has virtually no fat but is high in cholesterol. And eating large quantities of cholesterol rich foods most likely will raise your blood cholesterol levels- it did mine.

This is an easy conclusion to draw, but the issue is the majority of people are eating high-cholesterol foods alongside high-fat (particularly saturated fat) options. For example, fried shrimp.

The body is far less efficient at extracting cholesterol from the gut than it is fat, although this depends on the person (gut efficiencies vary by a huge amount and are dependent on the person's nutrition status/genetics). This is partly because a ton of cholesterol is secreted into the gut as bile.

Now the story changes if you happen to be one of the unlucky few who is cholesterol sensitive, in which case your cholesterol can spike if you have a cholesterol-rich diet. For the majority of the population, though, dietary cholesterol isn't going to have a major impact.

But then again, that is not a reason to go out and stuff your face full of cholesterol-rich foods, because then we have a problem of variety and moderation.
 

lefenzy

Senior member
Nov 30, 2004
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It seems to me that the best idea is moderation. Given the controversy, it would be safest, I assume, to not shy away from saturated fats but eat in moderation. There does seem to be consensus that easy carbs and sugar are not good for the body at all. Now my grandfather enjoys fatty cuts of meat and eats such meat weekly, but I don't see any harm from it, so I suppose saturated fats are not terrible.

Online, on the crossfit forums, there seems to be a lot of people advocating a paleo diet. This diet calls for eating like paleolithic humans. Now this sort of diet goes against the common medical consensus and I wonder if anyone had any commentary about it.
 

Kipper

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Feb 18, 2000
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It seems to me that the best idea is moderation. Given the controversy, it would be safest, I assume, to not shy away from saturated fats but eat in moderation. There does seem to be consensus that easy carbs and sugar are not good for the body at all. Now my grandfather enjoys fatty cuts of meat and eats such meat weekly, but I don't see any harm from it, so I suppose saturated fats are not terrible.

Online, on the crossfit forums, there seems to be a lot of people advocating a paleo diet. This diet calls for eating like paleolithic humans. Now this sort of diet goes against the common medical consensus and I wonder if anyone had any commentary about it.

The message to take away from your grandfather's experience is NOT that saturated fat is "not terrible," (it is in fact atherogenic for the most part) but that he only enjoys such cuts WEEKLY, as opposed to DAILY or THRICE DAILY. This is "moderation" as you put it.

Paleo diets aren't particularly unhealthy - lean meat, nuts, plenty of fruits and vegetables, minimal grains. It is basically a healthy diet, albeit with significantly reduced amounts of starchy carbohydrate cereals. There is nothing particularly wrong about it, except for the rationale behind it - paleo adherents claim that they are eating like "their ancestors used to" except that domesticated chicken, beef, and pork resemble nothing of their wild ancestral animals and neither do the vegetables resemble their wild counterparts. This is both aesthetically and nutritionally. Neither is there particularly convincing evidence that hunter-gatherers did not exploit wild-growing grains, and there is some evidence to the contrary, in fact. Although the diet is overall healthful, I think the underlying philosophy is complete nonsense and that there is no reason to avoid carbohydrates.

The diet also has a bit of sexy marketing going for it. Who wouldn't want to eat like we "evolved to eat?" Except that there is an overwhelming amount of physiological evidence that suggests we did, in fact, evolve to consume carbohydrates alongside protein and fat. But I digress.
 

brikis98

Diamond Member
Jul 5, 2005
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The message to take away from your grandfather's experience is NOT that saturated fat is "not terrible," (it is in fact atherogenic for the most part) but that he only enjoys such cuts WEEKLY, as opposed to DAILY or THRICE DAILY. This is "moderation" as you put it.

Paleo diets aren't particularly unhealthy - lean meat, nuts, plenty of fruits and vegetables, minimal grains. It is basically a healthy diet, albeit with significantly reduced amounts of starchy carbohydrate cereals. There is nothing particularly wrong about it, except for the rationale behind it - paleo adherents claim that they are eating like "their ancestors used to" except that domesticated chicken, beef, and pork resemble nothing of their wild ancestral animals and neither do the vegetables resemble their wild counterparts. This is both aesthetically and nutritionally. Neither is there particularly convincing evidence that hunter-gatherers did not exploit wild-growing grains, and there is some evidence to the contrary, in fact. Although the diet is overall healthful, I think the underlying philosophy is complete nonsense and that there is no reason to avoid carbohydrates.

The diet also has a bit of sexy marketing going for it. Who wouldn't want to eat like we "evolved to eat?" Except that there is an overwhelming amount of physiological evidence that suggests we did, in fact, evolve to consume carbohydrates alongside protein and fat. But I digress.
I agree with most of your sentiments, but wanted to add a couple comments:

1. Paleo doesn't really explicitly prohibit carbohydrates (ie, it is not like the Atkins diet), though it does exclude grains, pasta, sugar and many other products that are the primary source of the average person's carbs. Having said that, if you make the effort to eat lots of veggies, roots, fruit, seeds and nuts you can still get plenty of carbs on a paleo diet.

2. It is worth mentioning that strict paleo also excludes all dairy products, legumes (beans and peanuts), salt, alcohol and processed oils. The argument, as with the rest of the diet, is that these foods were not a significant part of the diet before agriculture (e.g. milking a wild cow was probably a bad idea).

3. Kipper is dead on with his point about today's food being significantly different than that of our pre-agriculture ancestors. Domesticated plants and animals are often extremely different than their wild relatives. Moreover, modern farming practices have further exaggerated these differences: corn fed vs. grass fed cows have vastly different fat ratios, modern fruits and vegetables have less vitamins/nutrients than the same ones even 50 years ago, and so on. The paleo philosophy is further hampered by the simple idea that, just because we didn't eat it in our past doesn't mean it is automatically unhealthy. Our paleo ancestors also didn't have toothpaste, antibiotics, and clean water, but few would suggest abandoning those. There certainly are modern additions to our diet that ARE unhealthy, but assuming everything from the last 10,000 years is bad for us seems a bit extreme.

4. Having said all that, going paleo would still be a huge benefit for many people. If there is one thing we know, it is that our "Western Diet" is seriously unhealthy. Unfortunately, exactly what about it - the hyper processed foods, the added fats, added sugars, preservatives, etc - is unhealthy is not quite clear (and likely very complicated). The good news is that just about any diet that moves away from the modern diet and more towards traditional diets is bound to be a change for the better (since obesity, heart disease, & diabetes have only become seriously problematic in recent times). My personal opinion is that a more moderate change in diet is more reasonable, but numerous people have had success with paleo (especially slightly looser varieties, such as paleo + dairy) and if you are interested, it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.
 
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