Saturated fats could actually be good for you

Challenging the long held idea that saturated fats are inherently unhealthy, new research at the University of Bergen shows that saturated fat actually could be good for you.

The Norwegian diet intervention study (FATFUNC) contests the validity of the diet hypothesis that dietary fat and particularly saturated fat is unhealthy for most people.

Researchers at the KG Jebsen center for diabetes research found that the quality of the food, including whether it is highly processed or not, could have a larger impact on health than the presence or absence of saturated fats.

In a randomised controlled trial, 38 men with abdominal obesity followed a dietary pattern high in either carbohydrates or fat, of which about half was saturated. Fat mass in the abdominal region, liver and heart was measured, along with a number of key risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

The researchers found strikingly similar health effects of diets based on either lowly processed carbohydrates or fats.

"The very high intake of total and saturated fat did not increase the calculated risk of cardiovascular diseases," said professor and cardiologist Ottar Nygård, who contributed to the study.

"Participants on the very high fat diet also had substantial improvements in several important cardiometabolic risk factors, such as ectopic fat storage, blood pressure, blood lipids (triglycerides), insulin and blood sugar."

Both groups had similar intakes of energy, proteins, polyunsaturated fatty acids. The food types were the same and varied mainly in quantity, and intake of added sugar was minimised.

The findings indicate that the overriding principle of a healthy diet is not the quantity of fat or carbohydrates, but the quality of the foods eaten.

Saturated fat has been thought to promote cardiovascular diseases by raising the ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol in the blood. But even with a higher fat intake in the FATFUNC study compared to most comparable studies, the authors found no significant increase in LDL cholesterol, while the ‘good’ HDL cholesterol tended to increase.

"These results indicate that most healthy people probably tolerate a high intake of saturated fat well, as long as the fat quality is good and total energy intake is not too high. It may even be healthy," said Nygård.

"But the alleged health risks of eating good-quality fats have been greatly exaggerated. It may be more important for public health to encourage reductions in processed flour-based products, highly processed fats and foods with added sugar," said the study leader assistant professor Simon Nitter Dankel.

The study was published online on 30 November 2016 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.