Back in 1977, government guidelines consisted of reducing fat intake to as low as 30 percent of calories, as a way to reduce the risk of coronary artery disease. These recommendations triggered a shift in the food industry, which resulted in the production of no-fat products substituting carbohydrates for fats.
Today, the guidelines for fat consumption have undergone a dramatic shift and are currently being reevaluated. The new guidelines should be released sometime in 2004. Here are the latest recommendations for calorie consumption from the National Academies' Institute of Medicine:
Experts pointed out that there hasn't been any evidence to support reducing your fat intake under 30 percent would prevent obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Also, research has yet to determine whether or not a limited amount of dietary saturated fats actually benefits a person's health. Since reducing saturated fats from the food supply involves a long and tedious process, researchers posed the question, "Should the steps to reduce the amount of saturated fats from the food supply be put on hold until evidence clearly shows which amounts and types of saturated fats are optimal?"
Researchers also recommended exploring the effects of saturated fats on individual metabolic phenotypes and then suggested performing further studies on the influences of varying saturated fatty acid intakes according to individual lifestyles and genetic backgrounds.
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition September 2004 80(3):550-559
Finally, some truth emerges to battle the ludicrous recommendations given in 2002 by the "expert" Food & Nutrition Board, when they gave the following misguided statement: "Saturated fats and dietary cholesterol have no known beneficial role in preventing chronic disease and are not required at any level in the diet."
Folks, this is a bunch of hogwash that has been harming your health and your loved ones for the last 30 years.
If someone is giving you grief about your contention saturated fat is actually healthy for you, please refer them to this article in one of the world's top nutritional journals that will turn their argument upside down.
Part of the scientific confusion relates to the fact that your body is capable of synthesizing the saturated fatty acids that it needs from carbohydrates, and these saturated fatty acids are principally the same ones that are present in dietary fats of animal origin. However, and this is the key, not all saturated fatty acids are the same. There are subtle differences that have profound health implications and having people avoid all saturated fats will result in serious health consequences.
The experts have falsely concluded that they understood fat metabolism when nothing could be further from the truth.
Most of what is known about the functions of fats is fragmented and biased by the assumptions made within the experimental investigations in which the fats were studied. This bias is particularly true for studies of the saturated fats, most of which have been examined solely for their tendency to alter lipoprotein metabolism and to influence the concentrations of lipoproteins that carry cholesterol in blood.
This distorted viewpoint based on insufficient data has seriously compromised your health in the flawed recommendations that have been given over the last three decades when it comes to saturated fat.
This review finally admits that it is impossible to achieve a nutritionally adequate diet that has no saturated fat.
I was delighted to see that the review actually supports nutritional typing (now the number one link on Google for the term). Studies clearly show that despite great compliance to low saturated fat diets, there is a wide difference in responses. This absolutely supports nutritional typing, which predicts one-third of people will do very well on low saturated fat diets (which supports the studies showing that they work), but also one-third of people need high saturated fat diets to stay healthy. I happen to be one of those who need a high saturated fat diet to stay healthy and warm. (A sidenote: The number four link on Google to saturated fats overall is an excellent three-part piece featured on my site by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon), The Truth About Saturated Fat.
The article goes on to support a Paleolithic perspective. Humans have eaten animal products for most of their existence on earth and therefore, they have consumed saturated fats for their entire existence. The approach of many mainstream investigators in studying the effect of consuming saturated fats has been narrowly focused to produce and evaluate evidence in support of the hypothesis that dietary saturated fat elevates LDL cholesterol and thus the risk of coronary artery disease. This narrow focus has blinded them to the benefits of saturated fats in other areas of human health.
If saturated fats were of no value or were harmful to humans, evolution would probably not have established within the mammary gland the means to produce saturated fats -- butyric, caproic, caprylic, capric, lauric, myristic, palmitic and stearic acids -- that provide a source of nourishment to ensure the growth, development and survival of mammalian offspring.
So the bottom line is not to let any conventional "experts" give you any nonsense about saturated fat. You can refer them to this landmark article and show them that saturated fats are essential parts of all body tissues and are:
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