From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 21:44:26 MDT
Brian Atkins wrote,
> I will give you some of that. To me, it simply is an interesting puff
> piece regarding some potentially health-increasing hypotheses. It has
> enough points to get me to consider the idea that the saturated fat
> dogma may be incorrect, but it certainly doesn't prove anything
> for certain.
Thanks for this much of an admission. Maybe I expected this to be more
rigorous than it really was. In my own research (years ago), I focused on
experimental results only. I would directly seen the experiments, the
controls, and the results. I could draw my own conclusions, or see where a
later discovered fallacy was present. In these kinds of papers, there is
not enough direct evidence or clear step-by-step logic to prove anything.
This paper doesn't convince me, but I can't prove it is wrong either.
Despite my being unconvinced that eating a lot of saturated fat is either
good for me or actually required for my health, these discussions have
definitely been an eye-opener for me. I had no idea that people were
actually advocating this type of thing.
It very well could be that we discover that saturated fats aren't as bad for
us as we think. I know it was an obvious conclusion to discover cholesterol
in arterial plaques, and assume that we should limit that stuff as much as
possible. Then we discovered that the body made its own cholesterol, and
dietary cholesterol was not a big contributor. Then we discovered that
cholesterol buildup did not occur randomly in the presence of cholesterol,
but needed arterial inflammation to build on. Now, we are not sure how
important cholesterol lowering is, but are focused more on preventing
inflammation and plaques. Our nutritional knowledge certainly grows as we
learn more. It may very well be possible that saturated fats are OK.
But there still seems to be a lot of evidence that high-saturated-fat diets
causes heart disease in animals. Maybe the truth is more complicated than
that, but I certainly don't feel comfortable recommending that people eat
more saturated fat. At this point, a quick search of medical references and
experimental studies still seems to show that the consensus is that
saturated fats are not required and seem to cause negative side-effects.
Unsaturated fats are required and seem to cause good side-effects. So for
now, I think the evidence still leans toward the monosaturated fats >
polyunsaturated fats > saturated fats > hydrogenated fats in order of
preference.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP, IAM, GSEC, IBMCP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> <www.Newstaff.com>
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