Guidance from health and human services secretary contradicts decades of dietary recommendations
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, is planning to issue guidance encouraging Americans to eat more saturated fats, contradicting decades of dietary recommendations and alarming experts.
“My response and sort of counsel to myself was to stay calm, and let’s see what happens, because there was no indication given as to how, why, when this potential shift would occur,” said Cheryl Anderson, an American Heart Association board member and professor at the University of California, San Diego’s school of public health and human longevity science.
“The recommendation around saturated fat has been one of the most consistent recommendations since the first edition of the dietary guidelines.”
While Ronald Krauss, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has researched saturated fats extensively, found that saturated fats may be less harmful than previously thought, he believes if “[Kennedy] is actually going to go out and say, we should be eating more saturated fat, I think that’s really the wrong message”.
I’m going to give him this one. Since it’s nutrition I’m going to give my oversimplified layman explanation of it.
Dietary guidelines started during the margarine era of food when it was heavily marketed as a healthier alternative. People flocked to polyunsaturated fats like canola, rapeseed and sunflower oils which in modern day has been associated with a lot of health issues including weight gain.
There also is a correlation between saturated fats and cholesterol but that too is more nuanced now when looking at high density cholesterol (HDL) and low density (LDL). The body can get rid of LDL easily bit HDL clogs up the bloodstream. People eating more unsaturated fat tend to have unhealthier lifestyles and more importantly when you control for those factors such as drinking, smoking and not exercising and look at LDL numbers the correlation disappears.
I’m not advocating for processed meats like sausages, salami and pepperoni which is another can of worms. You should also definitely have some olive oil (mono unsaturated fat) that gets is that sweet sweet conjugated linolic acid.
So in short, avoid rape seed oil, sunflower and canola, especially if old or cooked at high temps.
Olive oil is amazing, as well as coconut oil.
Cow butter (watch the salt though), gee and beef tallow are in general a healthier options and way more nutritious. They’re also more stable at higher temperatures like when frying on a pan and avoid a lot of health issues that come with polyunsaturated fats.
I’m going to reluctantly give this stupid lunatic this one.
I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt more often, even for outrageous sounding stuff, but he has a poor track record of backing any of his claims up with evidence.
Yeah, I think this one comes from the carnivore diet which is pretty dubious IMO. Inuit cultures have made it sort of work to be fair but the fruits and vegetables are just stupid good at fulfilling their part of nutrition needs.