“I read that saturated fat isn’t so bad after all. What do you think?”

First of all, keep in mind that there will always be articles like this in the popular press because “it’s what people want to hear. They like believing they can keep eating red meat and other saturated-fat-rich foods without clogging their arteries or promoting cancer,” points out Dr. Jay Kenney, Nutrition Research Specialist at Pritikin.

And what people want to hear is what magazines want to write about because these magazines will sell. That’s the bottom line.

In the latest “meat-is-good-for-you” spin, magazine writers argued the while foods high in saturated fat like red meat raise bad LDL cholesterol levels, they also raise good HDL cholesterol levels, which compensates for some of the damage the LDL is doing to our arteries.

Function of HDL

What the writers did not explain is that the function of HDL is impaired on a high-saturated-fat diet, and that more and more research is finding that what our HDL is doing may be far more important than our total amount of HDL.

In recently published research* on men in a three-week program at the Pritikin Longevity Center, for example, blood tests showed that on entry the men (typical high-fat American-style eaters) had normal amounts of HDL, but the HDL tended to be pro-inflammatory. That’s not good. Pro-inflammatory HDL promotes plaque build-up in the arteries.

But after three weeks at Pritikin, exit blood tests showed the HDL had been converted from having pro-inflammatory qualities to having anti-inflammatory qualities despite the fact that total levels of HDL had on average gone down a little. Anti-inflammatory HDL is beneficial because it does a good job of removing LDL from the arterial system.

Pay attention to the quality of HDL, not the quantity, lead author Dr. Christian K Roberts and colleagues at UCLA concluded. “The function of HDL may be more important than the steady-state plasma [blood] levels.”

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