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January 15, 2010
Breaking News!!!
This just in!
You have to have a full subscription to the AJCN to read the whole thing, but you can read the abstract here.
And just in case any of you skip the comments, this from RDF:
The abstract pretty much tells the story. The paper itself is somewhat tedious. The bottom line is that the recommendation of American Heart and other agencies to reduce saturated fat to 7 % is without scientific basis. But the details are important. The paper does not say that nobody benefits from reducing saturated fat. It says that you are as likely to INCREASE risk by reducing saturated fat as you are to decrease risk. Also, the previous idea that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat may still be true. (If true, it means that replacing SF with carbohydrate is definitely deleterious). I think it is not that AHA and others did not know that the SF data was bad but rather they thought, as in the punch-line to numerous jokes "maybe it wouldn't help, but it wouldn't hurt" to reduce saturated fat. The current paper shows that this is wrong. It can hurt. And it is as likely to hurt as it is to help. You are at the craps table: if you bet on low saturated fat and you lose, you don't get your chips back things have gotten worse.
I modified figure 2 from the paper to show that in the studies considered (a meta-analysis is an analysis of many already published papers) the outcomes are pretty much unpredictable. I will post someplace and post a comment as to where the figure is.
Posted by april at January 15, 2010 4:58 AM
Comments
OMG! I mean, who knew?
Posted by: Judith at January 15, 2010 7:41 AM
The abstract pretty much tells the story. The paper itself is somewhat tedious. The bottom line is that the recommendation of American Heart and other agencies to reduce saturated fat to 7 % is without scientific basis. But the details are important. The paper does not say that nobody benefits from reducing saturated fat. It says that you are as likely to INCREASE risk by reducing saturated fat as you are to decrease risk. Also, the previous idea that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat may still be true. (If true, it means that replacing SF with carbohydrate is definitely deleterious). I think it is not that AHA and others did not know that the SF data was bad but rather they thought, as in the punch-line to numerous jokes "maybe it wouldn't help, but it wouldn't hurt" to reduce saturated fat. The current paper shows that this is wrong. It can hurt. And it is as likely to hurt as it is to help. You are at the craps table: if you bet on low saturated fat and you lose, you don't get your chips back things have gotten worse.
I modified figure 2 from the paper to show that in the studies considered (a meta-analysis is an analysis of many already published papers) the outcomes are pretty much unpredictable. I will post someplace and post a comment as to where the figure is.
Posted by: Richard Feinman at January 15, 2010 7:46 AM