Maggie's Farm

8. Artery health
In healthy volunteers studied with a single high-fat meal, measures of arterial health and function drop dramatically for four hours. This was not seen after a low-fat meal.

My passion is preventing, and when necessary, unclogging blocked arteries in the heart, brain, and sexual organs using a natural approach and lifestyle changes. And although the enthusiasm for the Year of the Fat has swept across the United States and beyond, the scientific data suggests caution—even for a single fatty meal rich in butter, eggs, coconut or palm oil, full-fat cheeses and milk, and marbled and processed meats.

I don't know of any studies that demonstrate an improvement in health by adding butter, eggs, and other high-saturated-fat foods into our diets, which are already congested with excess salt, oils, and sugar. The wisdom of eating unprocessed foods that are mainly (or completely) plant-based remains the wisest path to health.

A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

[...T]he 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine study ... discussed the results of a “meta-analysis,” a type of statistical analysis that gathers data from many different studies and crunches them together. Hu first learned of the Annals meta-analysis a few days before it was published, when The New York Times sent him a copy and asked for comment. At the same time, Willett got a call from an NPR reporter questioning the study’s results, especially the conclusion that eating more polyunsaturated fat failed to lower the risk for heart disease.

“I knew something was fishy,” says Willett. He requested a data supplement from the journal and noticed that the authors had pulled incorrect numbers from some of the original studies, including the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, which Willett helps direct. Willett also saw what seemed to him to be another problem: the authors had omitted important studies from their analysis. Adding to the complications: One of the study’s authors was a respected colleague in HSPH’s Department of Nutrition: Mozaffarian, who was then still an associate professor at the School.

As Willett and Hu saw it, the glaring problem in the article was one of the findings: that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat does not necessarily reduce your risk for heart disease. According to Willett, “People don’t just remove saturated fat from their diets. They replace it with something else.” And this replacement, also called a “comparator,” can make all the difference. Exchanging a hot buttered cheesesteak for a half-dozen doughnuts does not help your heart; swapping it for grilled salmon with greens and olive oil does. That’s the full message. But Willett quickly realized that the full message of replacement was complex and not likely to make it into news media reports.