Eat Saturated Fat!
Or, rather, that’s what I thought that this article was going to suggest. Actually, it ended up being more interesting than I thought.
Researchers studied a group of Masai who live on basically a diet of red meat and milk, a diet that’s 60% fat, half of which is saturated. They have really low cholesterol.
They followed Masai who moved to more urban environments, and found that their cholesterol skyrocketed.
It turns out, the whole “Saturated Fat leads to heart attacks,” is a theory that was put forth in the 60’s because scientists noted that people with higher fat intakes have more heart attacks. They would have had to delete the Masai data point if they had known about it.
“In the nutrition field, it’s very difficult to get something published that goes against established dogma,” says Mozaffarian. “The dogma says that saturated fat is harmful, but that is not based, to me, on unequivocal evidence.” Mozaffarian says he believes it’s critical that scientists remain open minded. “Our finding was surprising to us. And when there’s a discovery that goes against what’s established, it shouldn’t be suppressed but rather disseminated and explored as much as possible.”
At any rate, the article made me happy in that it doesn’t do the, “if you want to avoid heart attacks, do this,” but it’s rather an analysis of research studies.
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I’m in the middle of reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, which discusses the Masai among many other data points. I’m not all the way through the book, but it’s a very detailed, study-by-study, scientist-by-scientist evaluation of the diet advice we’ve seen over the last century. The author writes for Science, so he’s not a slouch.
By and large, diet advice has been driven by people with borderline-religious agendas with a bad tendency to ignore any studies that contradict their beliefs. Consider this:
“The Minnesota trial began in November 1968 and included more than nine thousand men and women in six state mental hospitals and one nursing home. Half of the patients were served a typical American diet, and half a cholesterol-lowering diet that included egg substitutes, soft margarine, low-fat beef, and extra vegetables; it was low in saturated fat and dietary cholesterol and high in polyunsaturated fat… Overall, the cholesterol-lowering diet was associated with an increased rate of heart disease. Of the patients eating the diet, 269 died during the trial, compared with only 206 of those eating the normal hospital fare. When I asked [principal investigator Ivan Frantz, Jr.] in late 2003 why the studey went unpublished for sixteen years, he said ‘We were just disappointed in the way it came out.’” (Frantz worked for Keys, who originated the “saturated fat leads to high cholesterol, which leads to heart disease” theory, and then continued to promote it in the face of all kinds of conflicting evidence.)
The book systematically takes apart stuff that we totally take for granted, including foundational stories like “the American diet used to be more vegetative, only becoming so meat-heavy in the early 20th century,” and “an epidemic of heart disease began in the same period.”
Basically, nothing the government, nothing the surgeon general, and nothing a nutritionist ever told you about diet has ever been anything but half-baked speculation built on very bad science.
In fact, the MSNBC article you linked reads like a Cliff’s Notes version of the first section Good Calories, Bad Calories. I wonder if the original publication in Men’s Health credits the book?
One more bit: here’s a good Gary Taubes piece that just ran in the New York Times, talking about how epidemiology can easily generate inaccurate theories of health.