That graph is compiled from statistics from the British Heart Foundation's website.
According to whom, exactly? The person making the claims is essentially anonymous, and has zero credibility. Hell, their "citation" of the British Heart Foundation is a hyperlink to
their graph. It's hogwash; Joe Shmoe could make a claim that eating plastic is healthful, and provide an equally attractive graph with no scholarly link, and it'd be just as credible.
That is just speculation and you are ignoring the data where people do eat large amounts of saturated fat and have no heart disease.
While I have to admit, I was a bit overzealous in throwing in Vitamins A and E, science says it's not speculation. I propound:
Vitamin K has been linked to lower rates of cardiovascular disease.
Vitamin D too.
It seems to suggest that saturated fat has absolutely nothing to do with heart disease even when people get 50% of their daily calories from as with the Tokelaun.
Where did it say they were restricting calories?
They were not consuming saturated fat in moderation. It was making up half of their daily calories
They were subsistence farmers. Let's take a look at the list of modern subsistence farmers: much of Africa, much of India, parts of South America, Mexico, and a whole slew of third world countries. Not exactly cultures in which caloric intake is remarkably high, nor food aplenty. Sure, they didn't explicitly say the caloric intake was limited, but when they can only farm to feed their families, that historically hasn't translated into calories being plentiful.
You missed the most important part of the article:
So here’s the simple question and the point: how can saturated fat be bad for us if a high saturated fat diet lowers L.D.L. at least as well as a diet that has 20 to 25 percent less saturated fat?
It could be argued (and probably will be) that the effect of the saturated fat is confounded by the reduction in calories, but the A.H.A. diet also reduces calories and in fact specifies caloric reduction while the low-carb diet does not.
There was absolutely no control for the source of saturated fat in that study. Why is that important? Couple it with a caloric decrease, and you have no way to assess what caused the drop. If they had fed the lower L.D.L. group nothing but lard for a year, sure that makes a compelling case, but they have literally
nothing to point to as the cause here.
Under this study, these two situations are equally applicable:
1. A subject in the lower L.D.L. group eats three cups of garbanzo beans twice daily for a weekly total of 30g of saturated fat per week.
2. A subject in the lower L.D.L. group eats two pieces of bacon daily, for a weekly total of 30g of saturated fat.
The methodology is flawed, and because of that, there's no realistic conclusion that can be drawn. The whole findings section is turbid at best.
It only points to the suggestion of moderation being key if one chooses to ignore data showing saturated fat intake in the context of a diet which
doesn't restrict calories which includes the examples using the BHF stats, the Masai, the Tokelau migrant study and the
Stanford study I posted earlier.
No, it doesn't. If I am on a 3400 calorie per day diet, as is the rough average for the US, and 65% of it is saturated fat, you're looking at roughly 2210 calories from saturated fat, or about 245 grams of saturated fat a day. Now if we take the caloric intake of a reduced calorie diet, say 1800 calories per day (most of the world struggles to get close to this much), and you up the intake of saturated fat to 80%, you're still only getting 1440 calories from it, or 160 grams of saturated fat. Which is the exact problem for the "Whole Health Source" blog: it plays with percentages without regard to caloric intake, which again detracts from the credibility of the conclusion. Yet, again, moderation is the direction we're heading.
The Stanford study makes no claims about health benefits, merely which diet provided the most weight loss for a small subset of the human population.
Again, that is mere speculation unless you provide evidence for it.
Ask, and ye shall receive.
First you say saturated fat is bad and should be moderated now you say it's the vitamins and minerals mitigating the supposedly bad effects. You're shifting your argument.
I should have been more clear. Saturated fat isn't by definition bad, if that's what you've gathered from me, I have done a poor job of relaying my point. Rather, saturated fat in excess has been shown to be harmful. My point about vitamins and minerals mitigating bad effects was more as proof of concept that saturated fat in moderation isn't bad: foods high in vitamins and minerals that also contain saturated fat tend to have the effects of excess saturated fat tempered by said vitamins and minerals, as both have been linked to lowering the exact phenomenon that excesses of saturated fat have been linked to.
There is no evidence showing that munching on plants is going to significantly boost your health (yet there is evidence against it) and there is also plenty of reason not to eat lots of fruit unless of course you are going to support your claim that magical fruit compounds cancel out the negative effects of fructose.
Again, I'm not trying to vouch for vegetarianism as a healthier lifestyle. My point remains that vegetables do indeed provide nutritional benefit through vitamins and minerals that have been shown to have long term beneficial effects, as evidenced in my links above.
