this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Counter point - fat is actually healthy
No one food is "healthy" or "unhealthy", it always depends on how much of it and what else you eat.
True. But fat is one of the foods it's hard to eat too much of.
Try to sit down to a big bowl of butter. It's just hard to eat by itself. In fact it's one of the tricks used in the keto community to determine a addictive craving versus actual hunger. If you're willing to eat butter by itself, you're hungry, if you're not willing to eat the butter but you still have a craving that's addiction
Man, this would not work for me. I'm always willing to eat butter.
Could you eat a whole stick of butter by itself?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I could. I never did that because I have enough reason and willpower. But eating a bit of butter by itself as a "snack" is something I do sometimes and I'm sure I could eat a lot more if I didn't control myself.
I could eat slabs of it. It's delicious, I like shortbread cos it's just butter mixed with sugar and butter is good. I especially like cheese smothered in butter
I'm fascinated. You are the first person I've meet who has said this.
How is your nutrition overall? Are you eating well, any problems/deficiencies? are you underweight?
I get quite a lot of cravings and eating random stuff (like mentioned butter) between the meals is quite common for me. But on the other hand I really like physical activity and I'm pretty good at keeping a rolling estimate of my calories and macros. I use that to compensate for weird stuff I've eaten during cravings. I will adjust my next meal (or all the meals next day) to be lighter, I will go for additional 10km walk or run, stuff like that. In the end I'm able to keep my calorie balance in slight surplus which works out quite well since I'm strength training too. Occasional cut resets the situation when my weight gets too high. As for macros, I'm eating a lot of protein, and trying to keep carbs relatively low, although usually it's probably not really in the proper "low carb" territory. I also eat vegetables and fruits regularly. I think I'm keeping pretty much perfect weight. BMI is kinda high but that's due to muscle mass.
The only reason to avoid carbs is because they're pretty easy for your body to turn in to sugars. Though your body uses a lot of carbs directly, so if the rest of your diet is fine, don't fret about how 'low carb' you go.
For me the reason is that I just feel better eating less carbs. I feel less energy swings, I don't get sleepy after the meal. But eating actually low carb (say <50 g daily) is just very inconvenient to me as I really don't like cooking and meticulous meal planning. Well, and carbs are often fucking delicious. So in the end I eat pretty normal but I do avoid carbs whenever it doesn't require too much effort.
Is this a challenge? The answer is yes, multiple times over
Nah that's actually a myth itself. Pure sugar serves no purpose (in an otherwise healthy diet) and causes or exacerbates many minor health problems. It can make some kinds of arthritis go on the fritz and of course can directly contribute to (to the point of being a direct cause of) diabetes.
Similarly, saturated fats are much, much, much easier to get way too much of, which makes them worth avoiding.
There are a few other food components that are absolutely not healthy, but I don't remember specifics off hand.
Trans fats are bad.
Excess saturated fat could be bad depending on the health condition of the person.
ok, yeah, agreed.
This doesn't match my reading of the literature. Even if someone had extensive CVD dietary fat wont increase their bad outcome risks. The damaged cholesterol (glycated and oxidate) is the warning sign of CVD issues - and that is caused by dietary sugar/carbs/industrial oils.
Have you read this? https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2024/september/research-reveals-hidden-dangers-of-high-saturated-fat-diet
I haven't seen it before, is this the paper they are hinting at (I HATE it when articles don't mention the research they are talking about) https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.050878 ?
The problem with this literature review is the studied studies only look at 30% total energy as LC, which on a 1500 kcal daily intake is 75g of carbs, which means the participants were not in a ketogenic state, not fat adapted, and had elevated insulin levels during the study. I think they looked at a weak signal across the data set, but that is the purpose of literature reviews.
I'm glad they are reviewing the Noakes literature. If you look at table 1, every low carbohydrate intervention regardless of fat composition resulted in a reduction of liver fat. That tells us saturated fat is not a independent variable in this review.
From the conclusion of the paper
Likely tells us this is a opinion, and they qualified it in the expert opinion even.
Likely because this analysis isn't looking along insulin or ketogenic state. Probably because there is lots of paper competition, so taking a novel perspective has a better publication chance for a phd candidate.
It's a interesting literature review, but hardly a smoking gun against saturated fat as a demon, especially when you look at table 1 and the ketogenic interventions.
Please have a look at diet doctors literature review of saturated fat https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/saturated-fat#evidence-to-date
It's extremely well referenced.
Thanks. It is really good to know that I can be more relaxed with saturated fat in my diet. I'm already doing low carb.
Yeah, that's great! I hope you see improvements.
If someone is worried about saturated fat content of their diet they can always do calcium imaging of their arteries - it's inexpensive and gives a actual score of risk. As far as I've read in the literature serum cholesterol is not a danger, only if it's damaged - which can be measured by several proxies (tg/hdl ratio, fasting insulin) or measured directly through diffusion (though that is expensive).