April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Does Doubling Saturated Fat Intake Increase Saturated Fat In The Blood?
What does and doesn’t constitute a good diet seems to change almost every day. One item that we have consistently been warned about, however, is saturated fat. Links have been found to obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes and heart disease, just to name a few. But how much is too much, and where do we draw the line?
A new study from The Ohio State University found that doubling or even nearly tripling your intake of saturated fat does not drive up the saturated fat levels in the blood. The findings of their controlled diet study, published in a recent issue of PLOS ONE, also revealed that increasing levels of carbohydrates in the diet during the study promoted a steady increase in the blood of a fatty acid linked to an elevated risk for diabetes and heart disease.
The finding “challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn’t correlate with disease,” Jeff Volek, a professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University, told Emily Caldwell in a statement.
Sixteen adults were recruited, who all had metabolic syndrome — defined as having three of the five markers that increase the risk for heart disease and diabetes. These five markers are excess belly fat, elevated blood pressure, low “good” cholesterol, insulin resistance or glucose intolerance, and high triglycerides. The participants were brought to a baseline through a reduced-carb diet for three weeks.
Then, the participants were fed the same diets, which changed every three weeks, for 18 weeks. The daily diet consisted of 2,500 calories with about 130 grams of protein. They started with 47 grams of carbs and 84 grams of saturated fats each day, and ended with 346 grams of carbs and 32 grams of saturated fat per day.
The team found that the levels of total saturated fat in the blood did not increase. In fact, it went down in most people, despite the fact that the carbs in the diet were decreased as the total fat and saturated fat were increased. The researchers found that palmitoleic acid — which is a fatty acid associated with the unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that promote disease — also decreased with low-carb intake. It increased again as carbs were reintroduced to the participants’ diets.
“It’s unusual for a marker to track so closely with carbohydrate intake, making this a unique and clinically significant finding. As you increase carbs, this marker predictably goes up,” Volek said.
Volek noted that when that marker increases, it signals that an increasing proportion of carbs are being converted to fat instead of being burned as fuel. To ensure that the body will promptly burn the saturated fat as fuel and not store it, the researchers found that carbs should be reduced in the diet, while the fat is added in a well-formulated way.
“When you consume a very low-carb diet your body preferentially burns saturated fat,” Volek said. “We had people eat 2 times more saturated fat than they had been eating before entering the study, yet when we measured saturated fat in their blood, it went down in the majority of people. Other traditional risk markers improved, as well.”
Volek and his team found that the carb-intake point at which the body begins to store fat is highly variable between individuals, especially at the highest carb intake.
“There is widespread misunderstanding about saturated fat. In population studies, there’s clearly no association of dietary saturated fat and heart disease, yet dietary guidelines continue to advocate restriction of saturated fat. That’s not scientific and not smart,” Volek said. “But studies measuring saturated fat in the blood and risk for heart disease show there is an association. Having a lot of saturated fat in your body is not a good thing. The question is, what causes people to store more saturated fat in their blood, or membranes, or tissues?
“People believe ‘you are what you eat,’ but in reality, you are what you save from what you eat,” he said. “The point is you don’t necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat. And the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet. Since more than half of Americans show some signs of carb intolerance, it makes more sense to focus on carb restriction than fat restriction.”
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