Saturated Fats might not be as bad as you think…
For those of you who don’t know, February is Heart Month, and what better blog post than one on about the heart! We all know trans fats and hydrogenated oils can be dangerous, but for many years Saturated fats have also been under fire. It is often thought that high saturated fat intake lead to favorable conditions for increased heart-disease risk, but studies in the last 5 years have shown us otherwise.
What we know
Observational studies show no correlation with intake of saturated fats and increased risk of heart disease.
Randomized control trials have actually shown that a diet high in saturated fats AND low in refined carbohydrates actually can reduce your risk of heart disease by decreasing blood pressure, improving triglycerides, and improving blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. Moreover, studies have shown that drinking sweetened beverages (like soda pop) can increase your bad cholesterol and cause inflammation, both of which increase your cardiovascular risk. I’d love to get into much more detail here, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll leave it at that.
What we think
So it looks like it’s actually the refined carbohydrates and sugars that are the culprit for increasing our heart disease risk, much greater than the saturated fats. We believe that high saturated fat intake increases good LDL levels (betcha didn’t know there was good LDL!) but that with high refined carbohydrate consumption we end up with larger amounts of that good LDL turning into bad, Small-Dense-LDL. This, combined with the other negative effects of eating refined carbohydrates, leads to a condition called Athrogenic Dyslipidemia, which is one of the leading causes of heart disease.
As always, there’s more to the story: based on your genetics, you may be fine with high amounts of saturated fats if you watch your sugar intake; a small percentage of the population, however, requires a moderate to high intake of unsaturated fats to balance the saturated fat. Everyone is different, and the only way to tell is through genetic testing. One thing we can all agree on, however, is that reducing or removing refined carbohydrates and refined sugars from your diet will definitely go far in cardiovascular disease risk reduction.
