Saturated fats: Good, Bad or Ugly?

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I read with interest this systematic review and meta-analysis which concluded that saturated fats are not associated with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, ischemic stroke, or type 2 diabetes. Today, the social media, the Web, and newspapers are full with pro-saturated-fat articles. Medical professionals are also calling upon the nutrition experts who wrote the guidelines to reevaluate the recommendations on fatty acids and CVD on the basis of this mounting evidence that saturated fat is not the culprit! 1 With persistent flood of misleading nutrition claims in the media, it is not surprising that the public is confused and dubious about the real opinion on the relative risks of fat, salt, cholesterol, and sugar!. Five decades of controversy surrounding basic dietary guidelines and nutrition recommendations is a public acknowledgement of a failed research paradigm.2 However, the call by nutrition experts to restrict dietary saturated fat continues with the recently released U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.3 Archer et al 2 criticized this report as being primarily informed by memory-based dietary assessment methods (M-BMs) (eg, interviews and surveys) despite decades of unequivocal evidence that M-BM data bear little relation to actual energy and nutrient consumption.


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