Saturated Fat & Your Health

This is the third episode of my 4-part series about dietary fats. Today I look at saturated fats including where we find them in our diets and ways to approach consuming saturated fats. I discuss how the low-fat message went wrong and why nutrition can be notoriously hard to study.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Vibrant Lives podcast five minute food facts series.

I'm Amanda Hayes,

Your host,

A lawyer turned nutritionist with a passion for learning about how to live a vibrant life through practicing mindfulness and meditation,

Eating a nourishing diet and moving my body and sharing what I learn with you here on this podcast.

In my five minute food facts series,

I usually pick a popular nutrient or food and explain to you what it does in our body,

Why we need it,

How much we should consume,

Any risks associated with it and other useful information.

Please note that any information or advice provided in Vibrant Lives podcast is not intended to be used to treat or cure any injuries,

Disease or medical conditions,

And it is never a substitute for advice from your own health professionals.

Today I'm here to talk to you about fat.

This is the third of a four part series all about dietary fat.

The first episode was an overview of dietary fat,

Where I describe to you what fat is and the different types of dietary fats.

In the second episode,

I unpacked unsaturated fats,

Including essential fatty acids.

Today I'll be looking at saturated fats,

And the next and final episode will be about cholesterol.

So let's chat about saturated fat.

As you're probably aware,

Saturated fats have had a bad reputation for a long time.

High intakes of fat have been blamed for obesity,

Diabetes,

Heart disease and possible cancer.

In around about the 1970s,

Governments promoted reducing fat consumption,

Thinking it would reduce diet-related chronic disease.

However,

Advice to simply cut down on saturated fat did not produce the desired results.

If people ate less fat,

It had to be replaced with something,

And it turns out that what you replace the saturated fats with is important.

In the food industry,

Saturated fat was often replaced with carbohydrates.

All manner of low fat or fat-free products were formulated and churned out.

Fat was often replaced with sugar or other non-health promoting ingredients,

Like highly processed carbohydrates.

Many people became fat-phobic and not really aware,

Because they were following the health advice to eat less fat,

That the low fat products they were buying were not always the healthy substitutes they believed them to be.

So the reduced fat intake message has not seen great results.

At a population level,

The prevalence of overweight and obesity,

Which is a risk factor for many chronic diseases,

Has increased over the past few decades.

So the eat low fat advice has been called into question.

I mean,

Query of course whether people have actually eaten less fat,

But that aside,

The whole topic would make a thriller of a book and I can assure you it would be filled with drama and intrigue.

In relation to heart disease,

In a nutshell and without going into the mechanisms,

It is generally accepted in the scientific community that saturated fat raises cholesterol.

Cholesterol increases heart disease risk and therefore the link between saturated fat intake and increased heart disease risk was drawn.

However,

In recent decades,

Some scientific studies and reviews have examined and in some cases questioned that link.

The debate is ongoing.

Most nutrition scientists agree that saturated fat raises cholesterol and that cholesterol does have a role to play in heart disease.

And I'll talk more to that in my next episode about cholesterol.

Therefore,

They're not saying eat as much saturated fat as you wish,

Nor are they saying eliminate it altogether.

The role of saturated fat in chronic disease is an important debate to have though,

Because understanding if,

How and to what extent it contributes to cardiovascular and other diseases will help with better interventions and health advice.

In Australia,

Cardiovascular disease affects more than 4 million people.

It kills one person every 12 minutes and is responsible for one in four of all deaths.

Cardiovascular disease costs the Australian economy 5 billion per annum,

Which is more than any other disease.

So you might wonder why nutrition scientists can't just give a straight answer.

And why does advice seem to be constantly changing?

Part of the reason is that nutrition is a relatively new science.

So our knowledge is advancing all the time as we find out more.

Also,

As technology improves,

So does our ability to measure and test for certain things.

Another reason is that to really elucidate the healthiest dietary pattern,

We would need clinical trials conducted over long periods of time with highly compliant participants willing to stick to a particular eating pattern for decades.

This would be obviously costly and unfeasible.

In other words,

We may never know with certainty.

Another problem is that some nutrition studies rely on self-reported food intakes.

Human recall is far from perfect.

And it is well known that people tend to underreport,

So even getting the data to study can be fraught with problems.

In addition,

Of course,

We're all different with different needs.

For some populations,

For example,

An elite athlete,

A high carbohydrate,

Lower fat diet might work for them.

And for others,

For example,

People with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes,

A higher fat,

Lower carbohydrate eating pattern might be beneficial.

There is no one right diet for everyone.

But what I would say is perhaps the focus on macronutrient quantities is a distraction from focusing on the quality of what we eat.

Now let's look at some sources of saturated fat in our diet.

Foods that are high in saturated fat include milk,

Cream,

Cheese and butter,

So dairy foods,

Coconut oil,

Lard,

Processed foods such as cakes,

Biscuits,

Pastries,

Pies and chocolate,

And sausage,

Bacon,

Fatty cuts of meat and cured meats like salami.

To illustrate the quality over quantity point,

The following foods all contain a similar amount of saturated fat.

145 grams of rump steak,

50 grams of margarine,

And 35 grams of white chocolate.

Obviously,

If you're not a vegetarian,

Eating a rump steak provides you with protein,

Iron,

Zinc,

B12 and other nutrients,

Whereas white chocolate just gives you tons of sugar and fat and not much goodness.

So like many things in nutrition,

I think looking at one dietary component in isolation is not all that helpful.

I'd like to give you a few brief comments on two popular sources of saturated fat,

And that's red meat and coconut oil.

When it comes to red meat consumption,

The World Health Organization has classified processed meats such as ham,

Bacon and salami as group 1 carcinogens,

Which means that there's strong evidence that processed meats cause cancer.

Red meat,

Such as beef,

Lamb and pork,

Has been classified as a group 2A carcinogen,

Which means it probably causes cancer.

It recommends eating only moderate amounts of red meat and avoiding or really limiting processed meats.

The evidence about much-hyped coconut oil is conflicting.

On one hand,

It may increase cardiovascular disease risk,

But on the other,

It contains medium-chain triglycerides that may be beneficial.

I'd like to look at this topic in more depth,

And I'll do a separate 5-minute food fact episode about coconut oil.

So I guess the question at the end of the day is how much saturated fat should we eat?

Most organizations and countries recommend obtaining no more than 10% of your energy from saturated fat.

I don't find this very helpful.

I've studied nutrition and I can't accurately estimate the percentage of each macronutrient I eat.

Even fats themselves contain varying ratios of different types of fat.

For example,

Extra virgin olive oil contains some saturated fat,

But mainly monounsaturated fat,

Therefore it's considered a monounsaturated fat food.

In Australia,

The dietary guidelines currently say,

Limit the intake of foods containing saturated fats such as biscuits,

Cakes,

Pastries,

Pies,

Processed meats,

Commercial burgers,

Pizzas,

Fried foods,

Etc.

They also recommend replacing foods high in saturated fats such as butter and cream with those which contain predominantly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.

As I mentioned in the last episode,

The Australian dietary guidelines are in the process of being reviewed,

So I'll be very interested to see where the experts land on dietary fats.

Although in my opinion,

We don't need to be paranoid about consuming saturated fats,

And studies may have questioned the link between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease risk,

But they certainly have not discounted it.

Therefore,

I think the take home message is to be mindful of the amount and the sources of saturated fat that you eat.

My personal approach is not to avoid saturated fat.

For example,

I buy full fat yoghurt and cheese,

But I do pay attention to the ingredients and make sure what I'm eating is as natural as possible and doesn't contain any weird things I can't pronounce,

Or added sugars.

By the same token,

I try and eat saturated fats in relatively small portions,

And I'm conscious to ensure that unsaturated fats like olive oil,

Nuts and fish make up a bigger portion of my fat intake than saturated fats.

This is quite easy for me to do because I happen to really enjoy those types of foods.

I try to eat broadly in line with a Mediterranean style diet,

And that contains less saturated fat than a Western style diet,

And is associated with less incidents of heart attack and premature death.

I hope that you found something useful in that it's hard to give definitive advice in nutrition because it doesn't really exist.

At the end of the day,

I think if you try and stick to natural whole foods,

You'll probably be eating very well.

Thank you for listening to Vibrant Lives podcast today.

Eat well,

Move well,

Think well.

Reviews

Extremely helpful and detailed information in a short session. A breath of fresh air in recognizing the difficulty of perfecting nutrition and the fact it is highly personal. 🌺

Another great podcast! Thanks 😊

Very good information 🌸thank you

I love this. Thank you 🙏

Thank you 🙏

Always interesting & informative