Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

The American Heart Association (AHA) released it's Presidential Advisory on Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease this week and the responses have been all over the place (see medscape ,  science-based medicine , HNR , Gary Taubes , Cardiobrief ). Here's my summary/take: There's nothing terribly new about this advisory; it's relatively the same line of thinking/evidence that the AHA has used to support it's recommendations in the past, so regular followers of the field will not read this report and be too shocked. The most novel aspect of it is an updated meta-analysis of 4 diet-heart trials which the AHA generated. The new meta analysis comes about because there have been multiple meta-analyses which have attempted to address this issue over the past several years, and they don't all align nicely - see here , here , here . Why? Because the study inclusion criterion that are used are often not the same. Shorter term trials have consistently shown that satu...

Ugh, saturated fats. Talk about one of the most polarizing nutrients in the field of nutrition sciences. Observational data questions their link to CVD (1). Original meta-analyses of RCT data that substituted PUFAs for SFA didn't adequately isolate their effects, were accused of biased inclusion and further analyses that have corrected for biases saw beneficial effects disappear and some cause for concern, regarding n-6's (2, 3,4 ) - this has been critiqued as well here  and here . SFAs are just a scientific PITA. I don't personally fear consuming them - I prioritize some over others, sticking to plant varieties mostly. I personally take the perspective that if you're focusing a lot of your diet around plants, which are cardio-protective for a number of reasons (5,6), you're doing yourself some good. One topic of scientific discussion that's come up lately, and the reason for a lack of a link between saturated fat and CVD, is the way that LDL particle subcla...