Here is a Men’s Health article that I came across on the Performance Menu forum. It’s a brief skim-of-the-surface regarding why saturated fat won’t kill you as common wisdom tells us.

This was my favorite paragraph:

Now here’s the saturated-fat connection: Dr. Krauss found that when people replace the carbohydrates in their diet with fat–saturated or unsaturated — the number of small, dense LDL particles decreases. This leads to the highly counterintuitive notion that replacing your breakfast cereal with eggs and bacon could actually reduce your risk of heart disease.

I wrote once before about carbs and cholesterol levels, discussing a study showing that “When calories from carbohydrates replace energy from fat in a person’s diet, both LDL and HDL cholesterol levels fall while triacylglycerol levels rise, the researchers explain.”

“The message isn’t that you should gorge on butter, bacon, and cheese,” says Volek. “It’s that there’s no scientific reason that natural foods containing saturated fat can’t, or shouldn’t, be part of a healthy diet.”

Bingo! Eat natural foods raised in natural ways and you can stop worrying about the nutrient (macro- and micro-) quantities. As I said in my post long ago about the tropical oils, foods containing saturated fat are 100% natural and were a rich source of nutrition throughout human evolution. Coconut and palm oil are readily available from the fruits of these trees, whereas polyunsaturated fats have never been available in large quantities until the past century or so when we could press large amounts of corn, peanuts, and other foods for the small amount of fat in them. Animal fat was exceptionally prevalent in the human diet of the past two million years, yet our ancestors weren’t keeling over from heart disease. I overheard a meat farmer at the farmer’s market yesterday talking about how lard is making a comeback because of the detriments of trans fats. We all should have listened to (the proverbial) grandma that cooked her food in lard and slathered it in butter rather than using vegetable oils and man-made concoctions like margarine.

Anyway, read the article and marvel that Men’s Health has put out such a thing. It’s truly amazing and hope that one day people will “get it”.

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Tags: cholesterol, coconut oil, fat, palm oil, saturated fat, trans fat