Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm still not comfortable recommending that people eat saturated fat with abandon, but it's clear to me that sugar, flour and oxidized seed oils create inflammatory effects in the body that almost certainly bear most of the responsibility for elevating heart disease risk.
Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The abundance of cheap food with low nutritional value in the Western diet has wreaked havoc on our health; in America, one third of children and two thirds of adults are overweight or obese and are more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Saturated fat is a fundamental building block for brain cells. It's certainly interesting to consider that one of the richest sources of saturated fat in nature is human breast milk.
Certainly adding fats in the form of oils is fattening and unhealthy, but naturally fat-rich foods like nuts and seeds have profound cardiovascular benefits.
The problem with the standard American diet, a primary cause of our current obesity epidemic, is the fact that the majority of foods consumed are high in calories and low in micronutrients.
Contradictory as it seems, malnutrition is a key contributor to obesity.
Fat is one of the chief enemies of the heart because it has to be plentifully supplied with blood and thus needlessly increases the pumping load that the heart must sustain.
If you eat the standard Western diet that most people eat in the modern world, it's quite likely you will develop heart disease.
Unhealthy eating habits cause major health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, and can also lead to food insecurity, disrupted eating patterns, and low self-esteem.