Author Chris Kresser Says Eating Dietary Cholesterol And Saturated Fat From Animals Doesn’t Lead To

author Chris Kresser who believes in paleo diets says that according to studies eating dietary cholesterol does not lead to higher rates of blood cholesterol in most cases and even if eating saturated fat and dietary cholesterol does lead to higher saturated fat rates or blood cholesterol it still doesn’t correlate the higher death rates do you agree with this why or why not no I’m gonna start out with saying I have tremendous respect for Chris crecer I think he is one of the sameness voices in the paleo world I think he has he’s very astute and he looks at research very carefully so I really do I do have a lot of respect for him however I think he’s wrong on that one and I and I think he’s wrong for this reason we have many decades of solid research that shows saturated fat increases blood cholesterol levels and particularly LDL cholesterol which increases your risk of heart disease the studies are strong and consistent in our you know the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology guideline reports they suggest saturated fat be limited to five to six percent and the the level of evidence is the highest grade of evidence that exists and and it I mean I think it’s really quite indisputable now the study that most people are quoting to suggest that we don’t have to worry about saturated fat is the Chowdhury trial that came out in 2014 and the Chowdhury trial was so riddled with errors and omissions that Walter Willett who’s probably the most quoted nutrition expert on the planet made a very strong statement that people need to discard the you know the findings essentially and and just to give you some examples of the issues in that study I think I think there were really two to be you know big well one big issue is in many cases the studies that were included in the meta-analysis were controlled for cholesterol so you can’t control when you’re looking at saturated fat you can’t control for the thing that saturated fat increases which increases risk of you know or that you can’t control for a variable that’s on that chain of of what causes the disease it doesn’t make sense and so that that was one thing and then the other thing I think that is really important to mention is 19 out of the 20 studies were looking at pop is sort of comparing within population so comparing say in the United States people eating you know 11 percent saturated fat versus those eating 12 or 13 or 14 then they were looking at the Japanese some of whom were eating 5 percent 5 percent saturated fat some eating 6 or 7 percent they didn’t see big differences because the amount of saturated fat was so the differences in the consumption were so small there was one study included that actually looked at huge differences in saturated fat intake within the population they were studying that was epic Oxford the the of course the meat eaters were eating much more the vegans eating much less the vegans who were eating the lowest amounts which I think were around 5 or 6 percent about half the saturated fat of the meat eaters actually had to point 7 7 times less a you know lower rates of disease than the highest saturated fat eaters then the other thing that’s really interesting is if you compared the population that had the highest intake of saturated fat which were the I believe the people from Finland they actually had a four point four times higher rate of heart disease than the people eating the lowest in Japan they didn’t do those cross-cultural comparisons and and and so you know the other thing that I think is interesting about that study is is that when the study was first done they actually did show an increased risk with higher saturated fat in takes and this study was rejected originally from the first publication they you know they went to and then they actually reworked the data a little bit and and got something different before it was actually published and so I think they’re there there are some things that people need to understand that sometimes the headlines you know and the headlines were huge after that study came up butter is back saturated fat vindicated you know all of these headlines came and people came away thinking wow saturated fats been vindicated and in fact that study vindicated nothing as a matter of fact I actually a spoke via email with one of the co-authors of that study who said to me very clearly in an email this study does not show saturated fat has been vindicated she said nothing that that has been said for for several decades about saturated fat has changed because of this study saturated fat increases LDL increased LDL increases risk of heart disease period and and so I think that’s that’s very important to know and then the other thing to know is the American Heart Association put together a panel of the leading experts on diet and heart disease and and it was I actually spoke to one of the lead authors of this report it was the most comprehensive report I’ve seen it was called the presidential report 2017 and they went through all of the research and they were very very clear about a saturated fat and I’ll tell you what the message is the message is this if you replace saturated fat with refined carbohydrates you will not reduce your risk of coronary heart disease it’s it’s a wash they’re both bad and so that was the new information that we got from these studies however if you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat you reduce your risk about 25% if you replace saturated fat with monounsaturated fat you reduce your risk about 15% if you replace that trait of fat with whole grains you reduce your risk about 9% and to be honest in my opinion that would be much higher if the whole grains they were choosing were truly whole grains as they’re picked off the plant not flour turned into whole wheat bread I think we would see very different results so I think we need to be you know we really need to be cautious about this you know put butter in your coffee and you know cook with all sorts of oil and pour it on your foods this is not a good plan and it will it will backfire so people need to be very careful about this