Saturated fat reprieve? - a podcast by Donna Psiaki Feldman MS RDN

Recently I switched to whole milk yogurt, one brand in particular (which shall remain nameless as I’m not paid to endorse it).  It’s regular — not Greek style — yogurt, and not homogenized.  Fat and water don’t mix, so the cream separates and when you open the container, there’s a delightful and delicious layer of cream on top.  If I were really decadent, I’d just eat the cream off the top, but I don’t.

Wait, shouldn’t I be worried about all that saturated fat?  Dairy fat is notorious for being high saturated fat, not to mention high cholesterol.  We’ve been warned for decades about saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease.  Truthfully, I wasn’t all that concerned.  Saturated fat isn’t a big part of my diet.  Then by coincidence, I ran across a webinar on dairy fats that made me even less concerned.  The webinar was sponsored by another yogurt company (that also doesn’t pay me), so of course there’s a pro-dairy marketing angle there, but the webinar was more about dairy fats, not about yogurt.  The speaker looked back at the history of our fear of dairy fats, and discussed recent research that refutes those fears.

These are some key points



* Current consensus by just about every major health organization, including the scientific committee that advised on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, is that dietary cholesterol does not contribute to heart disease risk.  Nevertheless, official recommendations continue to promote a limit on cholesterol intake.  Why?  I’ll propose a reason: default bias.  Which means that people just stick to the status quo because change is hard.  Even when the status quo is demonstrably false or pointless, it seems.  Default bias is not a behavior that’s limited to nutrition policy; we’ve all seen examples of this in our lives. Medical treatment protocols are rife with default bias.  I’ll propose another more conspiratorial reason: plenty of food companies use “no cholesterol!!!!” for marketing purposes, selling margarine, fake eggs and other highly processed foods.  Removing the stigma on cholesterol removes the rationale for the marketing.  People might start eating real eggs again.  What to do with all those egg white omelets?  And what to do with all the reduced fat cheese-like substances?

* Plenty of current research on dairy intake shows no link between dairy fat and heart disease incidence. In fact, some studies show the opposite.  Many of these studies look at actual disease and mortality rather than just whether blood cholesterol went up or down.

* It’s also interesting to note that the mix of saturated fats in dairy is very unique and quite different from the saturated fat mix in other foods like meat.  Dairy contains some natural trans fats that have a unique shape and are substantially different from the industrially-produced trans fats found in hydrogenated vegetable oils. Trans fats are considered universally bad, but naturally occurring dairy trans fats seem to behave quite differently.



So should you start cooking with butter? Putting real cream in your coffee?  The research on fat intake and disease incidence still shows that intake of vegetable-source fats is important.  Olive oil, nuts, avocado and other vegetable oils should predominate, but that still leaves room for whole milk, real cheese and delicious yogurt with the cream on top.  The webinar emphasizes that high fat sugary foods (ice cream, whipped cream, buttery pastries and cakes) are not what you should be thinking about.  If you’re going to indulge in dairy fats, low sugar whole foods are preferred, especially the ones that include other key nutrients — think milk, yogurt and cheese.

The one drawback is calories.

Further episodes of Tuned in to nutrition with Radio Nutrition

Further podcasts by Donna Psiaki Feldman MS RDN

Website of Donna Psiaki Feldman MS RDN