© Wiseman Family Practice
It's a mystery that has confounded nutrition scientists.
People who have high levels of cholesterol in their blood — especially LDL cholesterol, a.k.a. the "bad" kind — are at elevated risk for cardiovascular disease.
Meanwhile, foods high in saturated fatty acids — including eggs, full-fat dairy products, and red meat — raise blood levels of cholesterol, including LDL cholesterol.
It stands to reason that eating these foods would increase a person's risks for cardiovascular disease, which is the number-one cause of death
in the U.S. and
around the world. This logic has led both the World Health Organization and U.S. health authorities to recommend that people limit their intakes of saturated fat.
But there's a problem: People who eat these foods don't seem to develop cardiovascular disease at elevated rates (CVD).A 2019 research analysis in the journal
Nutrition Reviews looked at the findings of both observational studies and randomized controlled trials.
It found no consistent associations between dietary intakes of saturated fat and heart disease — the most common and deadly form of CVD.What explains this disconnect?
A new hypothesis, published earlier this year in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, may provide the answe
r.
"I think we have been grossly wrong about saturated fats," says Marit Kolby, first author of the
AJCN paper and a nutritional biologist at Oslo New University College in Norway. "In my opinion,
saturated fat has been blamed for what refined carbohydrates do."
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