Saturated fat still demonized by mainstream media despite lack of proof

Hardly a week goes by without the media commenting on the dangers of saturated fat despite a lack of scientific evidence supporting this claim. Unfortunately, the media's continued spread of outdated misinformation does nothing to educate the public about this fallacy.

Read "Demon fat found to make food more nutritious."

The CBS Morning Show with Harry Smith ran a segment this morning called "The Latest and Greatest in Housewares." The presenter, David Gregg, senior editor at Behind The Buy.com, touted the new T-Fal Actifry as a way to avoid those "dangerous saturated fats."

The problem lies in the fact that saturated fats are not harmful and have never been proven to cause cardiovascular disease. So, why does saturated fat and cholesterol get so much negative attention?

Read "Do low carbohydrate or high carbohydrate diets increase risk of heart disease?"

In the 1950s, a biochemist named Ancel Keyes proposed "the lipid hypothesis." He believed dietary saturated fat and cholesterol were behind a rise in heart disease. Although Keyes presented data that seemed to show a relationship between saturated fats in the diet and heart disease, it was later found he skewed the data to fit his theory. His data was never replicated by other scientists and his theory has never been proven. For more on saturated fat and health see video below.

In the 1970s, while Ancel Keyes' lipid hypothesis was still in dispute in the science world, the US government became involved. Several factors came into play including a push by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butts to increase the production of agricultural crops. Carbohydrates like corn, wheat and beet sugar became cheap and plentiful. Food manufacturers began creating almost unlimited amounts of engineered foods high in refined carbohydrates.

Read "Food manufacturers play tricks on consumers and dieters."

Around the same time, Senator George McGovern headed a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that according to science writer Gary Taubes, "almost single-handedly changed nutritional policy in this country and initiated the process of turning the dietary fat hypothesis into dogma." Americans bought into the low fat diet myth hook, line and sinker.

This lead to a revolution in the American diet. We as a nation began to avoid animal fats that we'd eaten for centuries and replace them with high carbohydrate foods like grains that our ancestors only at in moderation, and vegetable oils that must be chemically extracted from plants, that our ancestors never ate. And we began a dietary shift what would contribute to what would later be dubbed "the obesity epidemic."

Read "Nutrition101: What are carbohydrates?"

Recently, Dr. Jonny Bowden stated that the saturated fat myth "was a widely accepted theory that guided government policy and affected your life in all sorts of ways - and was absolutely, boneheadedly wrong."

"According to a new study in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Nutrition in which researchers examined data from 21 different studies from across the world involving over 350,000 subjects, there isn’t a shred of evidence that saturated fat is associated with an increase in the risk of either coronary heart disease (CHD) or cardiovascular disease (CVD)." - Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D, CNS, is a Board Certified Nutrition Specialist, MA Psychology, ACSM, ACE, NSCA, American Society for Nutrition, and American College of Nutrition.

So, why does this "saturated fat is bad" myth persist today in the face of so much scientific evidence to the contrary? Several factors keep it in the hot seat including mainstream media's refusal to accept anything new on the subject as fact. This includes many physicians, nutritionists, dieticians, and health and diet writers who don't bother to read the latest research.

Another main factor is drug companies who have billions riding on statin drugs to treat the mythical cholesterol monster supposedly killing us. This despite a statement by Dr. William Mann, the director of one of the largest and longest heart studies in America, The Framingham Heart Study, that his study showed "the more dietary saturated fat and cholesterol one ate, the lower one's serum blood cholesterol."

This means eating saturated fats and cholesterol do not raise the amount of cholesterol in your blood. Along with the fact that the newest studies on heart disease point to inflammation as the culprit in causing heart disease, not high blood cholesterol, and you have no reason for the media to continue to warn people away from naturally occuring fats in whole foods like beef and dairy.

The media needs to stop spouting an incorrect and outdated party line on dietary saturated fat, turn on their lazy brains and do the research before they spread incorrect health and nutrition information.