Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade.
"Saturated fat does not cause heart disease" - or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.
The new study's conclusion shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.
Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world - even gracing the cover of Time magazine - for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.
Comment: See also: Butter is Back from the N.Y. Times. Looks like the MSM is finally catching up to the facts about saturated fat.
Also: Get saturated: four reasons why saturated fat is healthy