Saturated fat

So BMI is the dominant variable in determining LDL change.

Then Dr. Sotomoto did something really brilliant, which is a curious analysis where he modeled, well, what if these women say were consuming basically most of their calories, almost all their calories from saturated fat, which would be really hard to do in the real world.

But he modeled it such that if saturated fat intake was as high as 90% of total energy, so that would be eating a four to one therapeutic ketogenic diet where every single calorie from saturated fat or from fat was saturated fat.

So you would have to be like guzzling coconut oil and then eating a little bit of pure protein basically.

to achieve this.

This would be basically physiologically impossible.

But even if that were the case, saturated fat intake as high as 90% of total energy intake, if that were the case, BMI would still remain a significant and virtually unchanged predictor of LDL.

So bottom line, takeaway point here is that BMI dominates over saturated fat.

Today, we're going to talk to a New York Times bestseller, Nina Teicholz.

And she wrote one of my favorite books, A Big Fat Surprise, and really kind of cracked open this whole history and all of the contradictions around saturated fat, animal foods, vegetable oils for the first time.

So welcome to the show, Nina.

I couldn't be

It's great to be here.

Yeah, Nina.

So before we begin and get into all of these controversies, can you just tell us what put this whole dietary recommendation, saturated fat piece on your radar to begin with?

I'm a journalist and I really didn't know anything about nutrition.

So this was a good study from a reputable group of, of researchers, scientists, Washington University, a well-controlled study, well-designed, able to measure adherence.

The headline result was that a keto diet, which had twenty-three percent of its energy from saturated fat, quite a lot, cut liver fat by sixty-seven percent.

And that was, that was more than the reduction in liver fat that was seen on the Mediterranean diet or the third kind of plant-rich diet.

I'll get you to go into the, the details.

What's your kind of high level reaction to that take from this single study?

My interpretation of the data is that there is something about this reduction in carbohydrate, and I think in particular increase in protein, that is reducing the liver fat and potentially improving liver metabolism.

The s- design of this study can't tell us anything really about saturated fat in any other context.

It might actually be irrelevant here in terms of, like, the power of the reduced carbohydrate and increased protein at, in reducing triglyceride in the liver might be so great that the saturated fat is sort of meaningless.

Yeah.

The study is titled Saturated Fat and Cholesterol in Atlantic Salmon Feeds Are Important for Fish Performance, Fillet Quality, and Color.

So we're exploring why relying heavily on these novel oils inadvertently strips diets of saturated fats and cholesterol, and, you know, why maintaining these components in your formulations is just non-negotiable for high-yield production.

Right.

So to set the stage here, moving away from marine ingredients is a massive win for production scalability.

But we focus so much on the essential polyunsaturated fats that we've largely ignored dietary saturated fats.

And cholesterol, yeah.

I like to think of this like taking a high-efficiency factory off the main power grid.