Tag Archives: saturated

In the last year we have seen a change in what we are eating that is making us unhealthy. It turns out that after 40 years of being told that eating fat made us fat and we should avoid it as much as possible, there has been an awareness that we have been becoming more obese over that time even though there seems to be a reduction in the amount of fat we consume. Studies began to come out that seemed to show that this fat in the diet had nothing to do with heart disease. Although some of these studies appeared to be long-term in nature, the development of heart disease was argued to be longer in its development. In fact it is now considered possible that a heart attack at 54 years of age can have its genesis when you are in your teens.

So this has led to a growing and popular change in recommendations that increasing fat over carbs in the diet may be the answer to preventing obesity. Granted, we still realize that trans fat are a mistake in any amount, just now we are told that saturated fat is really not the culprit in making us fat we were led to believe. Overnight we were switching out margarine for butter, meat, whole milk and eggs. In my pharmacy this was taken as meaning the more butter the better by a fair number of patients.

But are we communicating the complete truth to everyone with this? In truth there really is a difference between saturated and polyunsaturated fats. It has been shown that these two fats result in a completely different response in the body. Regardless of the size or type of scientific study, we always have two strong sciences to fall back on for our foundation: biochemistry and nutrition. If we are unclear as to how one dietary study does not mesh with the last one we can at least take a step back and see how the results are caught by the net of these two fields to try and make sense of them.

The study I refer to is a February 18, 2014 double blind study in the Journal Diabetes entitled, Overfeeding Polyunsaturated and Saturated Fat Causes Distinct Effects on Liver and Visceral Fat Accumulation in Humans, showed us that feeding Polyunsaturated Fat does indeed lead to actual muscle growth, the opposite of what we would have thought in the last 40 years. Feeding saturated fat has the effect of increased visceral fat and liver fat, the type of fat I call the grim reaper because it is so metabolically active in producing inflammatory mediators more than any other fat in the body not to mention elevating immune system response to that area. There is an interesting paper on this from ISRN Inflammation here . The subjects were broken up into these two groups of saturated and polyunsaturated fat consumption and both groups did gain weight, it’s just that the weight gained by the saturated fat intake group was actual visceral and liver fat and the polyunsaturated fat intake group gained weight as muscle instead. There is much more to this study including differing genetic responses between the two fats here .

It is interesting to note here that fat creates inflammatory mediators that create more fat and that these mediators created as a result of other types of inflammation also create more fat in the body. In other words, inflammation causes fat, fat causes inflammation so fat really creates an environment that feeds itself . This means that once fat takes hold in the visceral tissue in a seemingly healthy individual from inflammatory reasons (ie a person that appears to be of normal body weight on first glance but with a body composition analyzer is much more than 20-25% body fat) it makes it more difficult for that person to lose weight when they physically see they need to lose weight (and at that point they are at 35% or more body fat). This person is definitely working uphill to lose weight, especially if the existing inflammation is still present.

The reasons for this initial inflammation are a source of great debate in the medical community. It could be an inflamed Achilles tendon, arthritis, dietary intake, or whatever. In fact the incidence of obesity in rheumatoid arthritis patients is positively correlated leading to a theory that this inflammation can lead to autoimmune.

But getting back to the main topic at hand, keep in mind that just because we now realize that increased carbs, particularly increased refined carbs in our diet can lead to obesity and that it isn’t necessarily ALL about the fat intake in our diet making us obese; this is not a free ticket to throwing ½ a stick of butter into your popcorn and getting healthy from it. Whoa there big fella. Can’t we just go back to our knowledge of biochemistry and nutrition and remind ourselves that when we deviate from the word “moderation” and “physically active” and we try to tie in long term health benefits with a huge change from what we know to work, no processed food, low sugar and refined carbs and moving (every day) it becomes less complicated. Hopefully Canada’s Food Guide will improve its recommendations to give Canadians a better list of how we should eat (separating fruits and veggies, completely eliminating trans fat, not making milk mandatory). Combining this with regular exercise to reduce inflammation seems to be the common denominator we keep trying to re-invent , and it seems to be over and over again .

Keep in mind that fat carries with it a large number of calories. The danger is switching to a diet that is a higher percentage of fat and lower in carbs than it used to be without discriminating what type of fat you are eating.