Here is something I posted a couple of days ago:
.................................................................................................................................................................................
Outside of the mainstream media and public policies there has been a lively debate about cholesterol and fats for over 50 years. While probably all you have heard is that:
A. Eating Fat makes you fat.
B. Eating Fat increases LDL cholesterol ,
C. LDL Cholesterol causes clogged arteries and heart attacks.
While I appreciate that it's near impossible to prove a negative i.e. that animal mainly saturated fats don't harm us, consider the following:
1. Ancel Keys implicated saturated fat for causing heart disease which was still relatively rare at that time when a US president in his 50's had a heart attack. To do that he selected 7 countries (from over 20 for which he had data). The 7 selected appeared to show a strong correlation, but taking all of them combined there was absolutely no correlation.
2. It is now known that smoking is a major cause of heart attacks and that President was a chain smoker. As was my Dad who died of a heart attack at the age of 45 in 1966 - it was not his first, probably his 3rd the others just being thought to be bad indigestion.
3. Despite a campaign for low fat, heart attacks didn't change much leading to many more cardiac doctors being trained in the UK. Then smoking was banned in public indoors - and heart attacks suddenly dropped! Incidentally At the conference held to decide upon the first US Dietary guidelines (to combat heart attacks and obesity) half the scientists said that eating sugar should be discouraged and the other half that eating animal fats should be discouraged. Since it was a stalemate and it was not possible to advise both, an assistant to the US Politician chairing the conference made the decision to choose to limit animal fats. This directly led to margarines and trans fatty acids being introduced into our diet.
4. In this forum we know that eating saturated fat helps us reduce our weight just as eating carbohydrates tends to increase our weight. Yet sat fat is still blamed for making people fat. It also helps control T2 diabetes (since it doesn't raise Blood Glucose levels) which itself is a major cause to heart attacks. So how is it causing more heart attacks while reducing a major cause of them?
5. Many medical studies, plus the figures from Dr David Unwin's GP Practice patients show that on a Low Carb (higher fat) diet his patients have (on average) much better HDL figures, much better Triglyceride figure and even lower LDL figures. So even if one believes that high LDL is automatically 'bad' (which I don't) How is it that saturated fat can ''lower' that LDL and yet it is still blamed for raising it in the first place?
6. Lastly, the observation that the majority of heart attacks happen to patients with 'normal' LDL (nearly 75%) rather than those with 'high' LDL. In fact almost half occurred in patients with 'optimal' LDL .This from a study done by UCLA hospital and published back in 12/1/2009.