A Conversation about Healthy Eating by Dr Nicholas A. Lesica

Author:Dr Nicholas A. Lesica [Lesica, Dr Nicholas A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2017-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Saturated fats II

OK, so what I’m getting from all of this is that I really shouldn’t eat saturated fats.

Well, hold on. It’s clear that saturated fats can cause inflammation in a lot of different ways, so you probably shouldn’t eat a lot of them. And if you’re overweight and backlog-driven inflammation has already kicked in, you should really try to avoid them. If I was trying to lose weight, I would try to avoid anything that might increase inflammation.

Right.

So there’s no question that saturated fats can cause inflammation. But here’s the thing: the diets that the researchers used in these experiments were pretty unrealistic.

What do you mean?

I mean that when the researchers overfed the mice with a lot of fat, they really overfed them with a lot of fat. In some of these experiments, the researchers fed the mice food that was almost 75 per cent fat, which is pretty extreme. Even in these last experiments that we were just discussing, the researchers fed the mice food that was 45 per cent fat, all of which was either saturated or unsaturated.

Those numbers don’t really mean much to me.

Well, if you ate only Big Macs...

Like in Super Size Me?

Right, if you ate like the guy in Super Size Me, you still wouldn’t be eating as much fat as these mice were eating. On the other hand, the researchers have to use such large amounts of fat because they need to be able to see effects within a few weeks or months. It’s possible that foods with a lot less saturated fat would have similar effects over the course of several decades.

I see. But there must be studies that have looked at what happens to humans when they eat different fats. I know those studies wouldn’t be as well controlled as the animal studies but they still might be able to tell us something, right?

You’re right. In fact, there have been quite a few studies but, as we’ve already discussed, they’re often hard to interpret. A human study can be well-controlled or it can be long but it cannot be both. When it comes to the effects of food on human health, it’s really the long-term effects that we’re interested in, right? Let’s say you kept a group of people in a lab for a month – which would be a very long time for a well-controlled human study – and fed them a lot of saturated fats. And let’s say that nothing really happened – no major weight gain or inflammation. What would that tell you?

That eating a lot of saturated fats for one month isn’t all that bad for me?

Exactly. But you don’t need to decide whether or not to eat saturated fats for one month, you need to decide whether or not to eat them for 1,000 months! Now, if eating something for one month did cause problems, you’d know that you should really avoid it altogether. But the fact that eating something for one month doesn’t cause any problems tells you almost nothing.

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