Hello Terry
I think quite a lot of people share your confusion and frustration. I know I do.
This is what I have picked up and filtered over the years, I have no idea whether it is right, but it is the composite of reading lots of stuff from both ends of the spectrum.
First off - many people have already made up their minds that EITHER saturated fat is bad, or that saturated fat is fine.
I get the feeling that research and articles are written and published to back an idea/position more than going in with an open mind
There is a good deal of scientific evidence against ‘saturated fat’. Much of it dating from some time ago, however new thinking casts doubt on the conclusions (and funding sources of that research)and there have been several, high profile recent meta-analyses of very large populations have found no evidence that saturated fat, per se, associates with heart disease. Saturated fat does raise cholesterol, but in these meta analyses, that raised cholesterol did not necessarily increase CHD/CVD. Which is interesting in itself.
The food industry has devoted a significant amount of money into formulating ‘low fat’ foods, and is likely to want to protect this investment.
As far as I am aware, there has never been a single study which looks at saturated fat in isolation (probably because it would be impossible to do one). People don’t eat just saturated fat - in any product that contains data there are varying proportions of mono/poly unsaturated fats too, along with a host of other things. What caught my eye when I first began looking at some of the early studies was that saturated fat got the blame where diets included more things like higher proportions of sausage rolls or biscuits. These do often have a high proportion of saturated fat, but it makes me wonder if it wasn’t something else in there that was doing the damage.
There are some substances in processed foods, takeaways and the line which have clear associations with heart disease. Most of us have heard about ‘trans fats’ which are pretty nasty, and have been removed from many products, but there are other compounds in processed foods (which may also contain high levels of saturated fat) which are probably best avoided and/or minimised.
I’ve read some interesting stuff about heart disease which points the finger at ‘arterial inflammation’ rather than ‘sat fat clogging’ as the method by which processed foods may negatively impact heart and CV health. And again it is the processed foods which contain these inflammatory compounds, which damage the blood vessels and which circulating cholesterol then tries to cover over and repair.
If you keep barking your shins on a coffee table, having plasters in your bathroom cabinet is not necessarily a problem (as long as you don’t have a ridiculous amount blocking up the whole thing). What you need to do is remove or reduce the size of the coffee table to keep your shins undamaged.
I am much more relaxed these days about saturated fat in proper meat, cheese and so on. I am still cautious of high fat, highly processed foods, and probably eat more takeaways and other stuff than I should, but I check labels for some of the chemical nasties that are rather similar to trans fats) to try to minimise those. I am generally avoiding anything labelled ‘low fat’ now as the labels on those generally read like a chemist’s dictionary.
