You know the drill. Watch or read the health media and you will be regularly told to avoid saturated fats because they raise your LDL cholesterol, which will ultimately clog your arteries and lead to heart disease.

The problem with this recommendation is that it is only based on a theory, and worse yet that theory has never been proven. In fact, the recent studies that carefully examine saturated fat disprove this.

The video above provides a comical illustration of what happens when a renowned international cardiologist publishes a groundbreaking article¹ that debunks saturated fat. He is challenged by two ignorant dietitians spouting what they had been taught years ago.

Interestingly, a new American Heart Association (AHA) study claims eating the “right” fats could save 1 million lives per year.

Indeed, this is likely an understatement, but the researchers got the fats wrong and now are spreading misinformation that will likely cause needless pain, suffering and premature deaths.

Saturated Fats Are NOT to Blame for Heart Disease

The widely circulated assumption that eating a diet high in saturated fats leads to heart disease is simply wrong, as they are actually necessary to promote health and prevent disease. Dietary fats can be generally classified as:

• Saturated
• Monounsaturated
• Polyunsaturated

A “saturated” fat means that all carbon atoms have maxed out their hydrogens and as a result there are no double bonds that are perishable to oxidation and going rancid. Fats in foods contain a mixture of fats, but in foods of animal origin a large proportion of the fatty acids are saturated.

So How Did These Natural Saturated Fats Come to Be Vilified?

In 1953, Ancel Keys, Ph.D. published a seminal paper that led to a later study that served as the basis for nearly all of the initial scientific support for the so-called “diet-heart hypothesis.”

Conducted from 1958 to 1970, and known as the Seven Countries Study, this research linked the consumption of dietary fat to coronary heart disease.²

What you may not know is that when Keys published his analysis that claimed to prove the link between dietary fats and heart disease, he selectively analyzed information from only seven countries to prove his correlation, rather than comparing all the data available at the time — from 22 countries.

As you might suspect, the studies he excluded were those that did not fit with his hypothesis, namely those that showed a low percentage of fat in their diet and a high incidence of death from heart disease as well as those with a high-fat diet and low incidence of heart disease (like France).

If all 22 countries had been analyzed, there would have been no correlation found whatsoever.

Journalist Nina Teicholz, author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” also stated that when researchers went back and analyzed some of the original data, heart disease was most correlated with sugar intake, not saturated fat.³

What’s Wrong With the 2015 Dietary Guidelines?

I recently interviewed Nina Teicholz about the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (below). While there were many positive changes, such as the elimination of a limit on dietary cholesterol, the fallacies about saturated fats remain.

These guidelines are highly relevant, as they determine what foods will be served in feeding assistance programs, including the National School Lunch Program, programs for the elderly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and military rations.

Through these programs, they determine what 1 in 4 Americans will eat on a daily basis. They also dictate the advice you’ll get from your doctor, nutritionist, or dietician. According to Nina, when the guidelines were launched in the 1980’s, one single Senate staffer wrote what became the national dietary guideline.

He was heavily influenced by certain scientists, and didn’t have the background to conduct a sound review of the science.

Those guidelines resulted in a diet that is low in fat and high in carbohydrates, and it has remained that way ever since. This type of diet is clearly tied to obesity, diabetes, and many other chronic health problems.

The guidelines are still to this day heavily influenced by industries whose main concern is unrelated to the public health—a fact pointed out in Nina’s controversial article⁴ in The British Medical Journal, which was eventually retracted after 170 scientists signed a letter asking for its retraction.

Why The Saturated Fat Myth Continues

Click HERE to watch the full interview!

So why does the saturated fat myth remain, despite all the evidence showing it’s false? Why won’t the guidelines committee review the now overwhelming evidence and set the record straight? As noted by Nina:

“I think that there are two kind of big explanations for why this is [not done]. One is that there are huge industry interests. Because the guidelines are part of the USDA, half of the USDA’s mission is to promote agriculture.

At the same time, they have a mandate to tell people to eat less of some things over other things. Those two mandates conflict…What are the industries that benefit from the guidelines? The makers of carbohydrate-based food… Corn, soy, and the vegetable oil manufacturers. Because when you tell people not to eat saturated fats, what they eat instead are unsaturated fats, mainly vegetable oils, which have increased over 91 percent over the last three decades…

The other major factor that keeps the guidelines from changing…is that there’s a tremendous professional investment in this particular kind of advice. There are university professors’ reputations staked on it. There are many institutions who have invested in this particular hypothesis about what makes people healthy… These giant institutions cannot be seen as flip-flopping. They can’t be wrong. That prevents backing out of any advice that might be flawed.”

Cutting Back on Saturated Fats Doesn’t Lengthen Life: 6 Major Studies

…

Dietary Guidelines to Reduce Fat Were Introduced Without Any Supporting Evidence

In 1977, the U.S. released the first national dietary guidelines, which urged Americans to cut back on fat intake. In a radical departure from current diets at the time, the guidelines suggested Americans eat a diet high in grains and low in fat, with vegetables oils taking the place of most animal fats. The U.K. released similar guidelines in 1983. The guidelines were controversial, and even the American Medical Association said at the time:¹⁶

“The evidence for assuming that benefits to be derived from the adoption of such universal dietary goals … is not conclusive and there is potential for harmful effects from a radical long-term dietary change as would occur through adoption of the proposed national goals.”

There’s no telling how many have been prematurely killed by following these flawed low-fat guidelines, yet despite mounting research refuting the value of cutting out fats, such recommendations are still being pushed. Further, according to research by Zoe Harcombe, Ph.D. and published in the Open Heart journal, there was no scientific basis for the recommendations to cut fat from the U.S. diet in the first place.¹⁷

The guidelines were, and still are, quite extreme, calling for Americans to reduce overall fat consumption to 30 percent of total energy intake and reduce saturated fat consumption to 10 percent of total energy intake. No randomized controlled trial (RCT) had tested these recommendations before their introduction, so Harcombe and colleagues examined the evidence from RCTs available to the U.S. and UK regulatory committees at the time the guidelines were implemented.

Six dietary trials, involving 2,467 men, were available, but there were no differences in all-cause mortality and only non-significant differences in heart-disease mortality resulting from the dietary interventions. As noted in Open Heart:¹⁸ “Recommendations were made for 276 million people following secondary studies of 2467 males, which reported identical all-cause mortality. RCT evidence did not support the introduction of dietary fat guidelines.”

…

In Summary, Saturated Fats Are Healthy

Saturated fats:

• Increase your LDL levels, but they increase the large fluffy particles that are not associated with an increased risk of heart disease
• Increase your HDL levels. This more than compensates for any increase in LDL
• Do NOT cause heart disease as made clear in all the above-referenced studies
• Do not damage as easily as other fats because they do not have any double bonds that can be damaged through oxidation
• Serve to fuel mitochondria and produce far less damaging free radicals than carbs

To read the whole article, go to the link below from which this was excerpted:

from:    http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/03/06/saturated-fat-diet-heart-disease.aspx