https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/25/rfk-jr-saturated-fats
"Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services (HHS) secretary, is
planning to issue guidance encouraging Americans to eat more saturated fats,
contradicting decades of dietary recommendations and alarming experts.
“My response and sort of counsel to myself was to stay calm, and let’s see what
happens, because there was no indication given as to how, why, when this
potential shift would occur,” said Cheryl Anderson, an American Heart
Association board member and professor at the University of California, San
Diego’s school of public health and human longevity science.
“The recommendation around saturated fat has been one of the most consistent
recommendations since the first edition of the dietary guidelines.”
While Ronald Krauss, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University
of California, San Francisco, who has researched saturated fats extensively,
found that saturated fats may be less harmful than previously thought, he
believes if “[Kennedy] is actually going to go out and say we should be eating
more saturated fat, I think that’s really the wrong message”.
Kennedy has indicated that new dietary guidelines will “stress the need to eat
saturated fats of dairy, of good meat, of fresh meat and vegetables … When we
release those, it will give everybody the rationale for driving it into our
schools,” according to recent reporting in the
Hill.
Krauss’s research shows that “saturated fat is relatively neutral” compared
with what scientists have believed in the past.
His studies have shown that reducing saturated fat intake is only beneficial if
you replace it with the right things. Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated
fats such as olive oil and “polyunsaturated fats from other plant sources can
really improve metabolic health and reduce heart disease risk, but that’s not
saying that saturated fat is necessarily harmful”, Krauss said. His research
also found that replacing saturated fats with sugars and carbohydrates can
actually increase heart disease risk.
Krauss said that guidelines that create a particular cutoff point for saturated
fats, like the current guideline of 10%, tend to be arbitrary.
But, Anderson explained, “if you don’t focus so much on where the line might be
drawn around how much saturated fat, what you can see is that the more
saturated fat that’s consumed in the population, the higher the risk for
elevated cholesterol, the more people develop cardiovascular disease”.
While Anderson agrees with Krauss that what people choose to eat instead of
saturated fats matters, she does not agree that saturated fat is itself
“neutral”.
“When you look at the current American diet, there’s too much saturated fat in
it, and so, currently, it’s not having a neutral impact on our population,” she
said."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
