Many
of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat,
butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new
analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that
eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.The
new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged
the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and
will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.
For
decades, health officials have urged the public to avoid saturated fat
as much as possible, saying it should be replaced with the unsaturated
fats in foods like nuts, fish, seeds and vegetable oils.
But the
new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal
Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated
fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less
disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including
monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil.
"My
take on this would be that it's not saturated fat that we should worry
about" in our diets, said Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, the lead author of the
new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of
public health and primary care at Cambridge University.
But Dr.
Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard
School of Public Health, said the findings should not be taken as "a
green light" to eat more steak, butter and other foods rich in saturated
fat. He said that looking at individual fats and other nutrient groups
in isolation could be misleading, because when people cut down on fats
they tend to eat more bread, cold cereal and other refined carbohydrates
that can also be bad for cardiovascular health.
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