Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link.

[elleng]

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

The new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.

For decades, health officials have urged the public to avoid saturated fat as much as possible, saying it should be replaced with the unsaturated fats in foods like nuts, fish, seeds and vegetable oils.

But the new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil.

“My take on this would be that it’s not saturated fat that we should worry about” in our diets, said Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, the lead author of the new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of public health and primary care at Cambridge University.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/study-questions-fat-and-heart-disease-link/?hp

[Kelvin Mace]

1. MAKE.UP.YOUR.MIND!!!!

[elleng]

2. Don't be SILLY!

[tridim]

3. I'm a year into my high saturated fat coconut oil diet and feeling FANTASTIC!

Saturated fat is the opposite of bad.

Heart disease is caused by inflammation, low fat diets and statin drugs make inflammation worse.

[grasswire]

13. absolutely

It is inflammation that causes heart disease. Any doctor who tries to push statins on me gets a horse laugh and the boot.

It's hard to find an M.D. who is up to speed, though.

[Shrike47]

4. Does this mean the return of bacon?

[Warpy]

6. If you can find it unsalted.

Salt's the killer in bacon. Maybe soaking it overnight would remove a lot of that salt.

[Warpy]

5. I've taken care of too many skinny people wih heart disease to buy it.

The biggest predictor is a strong family history of early cardiovascular disease . A close second is a history of smoking. Put them both together, the person is a ticking time bomb.

Nobody can do a thing about a family history except be followed closely and pay attention to what their body is telling them. Avoiding smoking makes that family history express itself a lot later than it does in smokers.

In addition, 90% of the cholesterol load in a person's system is created by the liver. We'd die without the stuff. Some people are born with normal levels over 300 and early intervention with statin drugs is a known life saver.

So this study doesn't surprise me in the least.

[elleng]

8. Thanks, Warpy.

Useful info.

[tridim]

9. You're honestly recommending statins as a life saver? Wow.

Statins are killing people and destroying lives, My parents included.

You need to do some further research, things have changed. Your wrongness is dangerous IMO.

[Warpy]

11. You're honestly denying that?

Wow. You need to do the research on people who were born with ultra high cholesterol loads. It's genetic and such people generally died in their 30s and 40s. Now they get old with the rest of us.

There is nothing so dangerous as a little learning. I suggest you forgo your usual fare of anti pharmaceutical websites and do a little wider reading to correct that.

[tridim]

12. I've done more research on this issue than any doctor I know.

Lack of cholesterol is a killer. Lack of CoQ10 is a killer. Statins block both, and more.

Statins don't cure anything, especially heart disease, and should not be prescribed to anyone except those that have already had a heart attack.

I'd love to talk to you about this, but apparently you don't even know that cholesterol is a molecule necessary for life. That's step one.

[JEFF9K]

7. Bad study. ...

Bad study. ... The comparison should be between a high-cholesterol group and a strict vegan zero-cholesterol group.

[hedgehog]

10. Eat food your (great)grandmother cooked, and the pieces will fall into place.

"A large clinical trial last year, which was not included in the current analysis, found that a Mediterranean diet with more nuts and extra virgin olive oil reduced heart attacks and strokes when compared with a lower fat diet with more starches."

[bemildred]

14. Just avoid manufactured food. nt

[SheilaT]

15. I do think that there's not enough attention paid

to what I'm going to call fake foods. As someone else has noted, fix what your grandmother or great-grandmother would have fixed and you'll be pretty much okay.

I fix much of my own meals "from scratch", meaning I don't use very many pre-prepared things. I buy meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, seasonings, and so on, and I create most of my own meals. I will readily confess to a few packaged things that I love, such as Rice A Roni rice pilaf. And I buy boxes of chicken or beef broth, but I only buy the low sodium versions these days.

Butter, not margarine. I also wonder about the spray on thing for baking. What's wrong with butter or Crisco or a vegetable oil?

Salt is also not the enemy it's made out to be. We need salt to maintain blood volume, for one thing. Some of us tend to retain water and/or get high blood pressure from too much of that good thing. I'm apparently one of them, because a few years ago my blood pressure spiked and stayed up. I blame it mostly on the stress of a divorce, but even after all that shook out, my blood pressure remained high. Last year I started taking a low dose diuretic and my blood pressure has come down to where it should be.

Here's another thing that maybe matters. What runs in your family? In mine, heart disease is rampant. Of course, the older generation all smoked, every single one of them, which certainly didn't help. And heart disease has shown up in my generation. In a person who smokes, interestingly enough. Cancer? Not in either my paternal or maternal line. Yes, I do know that cancer can be somewhat random, and that the genetic connection while strong, is not absolute. But I don't worry about it, if for no other reason that I'm not someone to worry a lot about things I can't change.