Is The Keto Diet Healthy? (Saturated Fats) | Jason Fung

is the keto diet unhealthy it recommends eating plenty of total fat and saturated fat and isn't that going to clog up your arteries causing heart attacks and strokes we're going to review the latest scientific evidence as reviewed by the top heart doctors [Music] should you eat saturated fat since the 1960s doctors have been saying that we should avoid this to prevent heart disease but i'm going to review the surprising results of the recent evidence that shows that saturated fat does not actually cause heart disease one of the big trends over the last few years is the ketogenic diet that has said you don't have to worry that eating too much saturated fat and total fat might cause heart disease and surprisingly the cardiologists agree i'm going to review this article which was published in the journal of the american college of cardiology in august of 2020. it's a state-of-the-art review which means that all the top cardiologists the top heart specialists got together to discuss should we place limits on how much saturated fat we eat and the surprising conclusion they came to is this this is their abstract which says that many years of studies have shown that there's actually no beneficial effects of reducing saturated fat on heart disease instead they found that people who ate more fat tended to be protected against stroke this illustration from this paper shows that the previous advice was to limit how much saturated fat you ate but when they look at all the studies that have been done over the last 50 years that you really have to look not just at the saturated fat in the food but the whole food all together to determine whether or not it's healthy or not most saturated fat comes from whole fat dairy from red meat and from dark chocolate which are complex food matrices that tend to have a lot of saturated fat and when you study these foods these natural fats it's clear that there's no increased risk of heart disease diabetes or stroke so what these top heart specialists are calling for in this state of the art review is that we should make recommendations not on specific nutrients but we should base them on foods we shouldn't be avoiding fat because we don't eat fat we eat foods we eat dairy we eat meats we eat breads these are foods you have to look at the whole food in context and when you look at those there's no reason to avoid full fat dairy red meat or dark chocolate and that's their conclusion after coming together and discussing it and we'll go through the evidence why let's go back in time and see how we got to this point in 1977 the american government released a document the dietary guidelines and in it they specifically recommended to avoid eating too much fat too much saturated fat and too much cholesterol but the evidence to support this statement was not very strong it was based on just a few observations from an influential researcher this was a seven-country study and in it it shows the association between countries that ate a lot of saturated fat and their rate of heart disease but it wasn't quite true because the data was cherry picked when you looked at all the countries that had data available the correlation was very weak but nevertheless the american government felt that they had to make some kind of recommendation so they hastily made that recommendation to avoid eating too much fat and too much dietary fat and this led to the change in habits from eating for example animal fats which are high in saturated fats and things such as butter and instead we were recommended to eat lots of margarine as a replacement which was made from unsaturated fats or vegetable oils it's also important to distinguish between the saturated fat in our diets and the amount of saturated fatty acids in our blood because when we look at the science we see that the amount of saturated fat in our blood is more related to the amount of carbohydrate that we take through the process of de novo lipogenesis de novo lipogenesis is where the body takes excess carbohydrates and the liver will turn that into fats for storage and these tend to be saturated fats in the blood all of this that i'm going over in this video can also be found in that article so you can have a look at it if you're interested for more details the reason the low-fat diet was thought to reduce heart disease is because it could lower the ldl cholesterol and the ldl cholesterol was associated with the rate of heart disease but newer research has shown that it's not quite that simple because these lower fat diets tend to reduce the larger ldl particles which are not thought to cause heart disease on the flip side we know that things such as diabetes and other metabolic diseases contribute hugely to the risk of heart disease and the amount of dietary saturated fat is actually not related to the level of blood saturated fat because in fact it tracks much more closer to the amount of carbohydrates we take in through that process of de novo lipogenesis and therefore higher dietary fat intake is going to be associated with a lower saturated fat in the blood whereas increased carbohydrates in the diet are going to be increasing the amount of saturated fat in the blood exactly the opposite of what you would think the high levels of palmitoleic acid a type of saturated fat in fact is associated with a 67 increased risk of heart disease and a 52 increased risk of stroke the other thing that became clear over the last 50 years of research is that a food is more than just the macronutrients it contains the carbs the proteins and the fats because there are differences between fats and different the types of fats that are in it and it's an interaction between the naturally occurring components and the unhealthy components which are induced by processing this is best illustrated in the whole trans fat debacle in the 1950s vegetable oils were recognized to lower our serum cholesterol and therefore thought to be heart healthy this led to a huge movement away from butter and we are encouraged for our heart's sake to eat more margarine in order to stabilize that margarine these vegetable oils were hydrogenated which created trans fats so in our effort to protect our heart we are actually eating the trans fats that are now known to cause heart disease in the 1980s and 1990s all the nutritional authorities the doctor kept emphasizing that you should eat very low fat but slowly over those decades it was clear that this initial gas because there was no evidence to actually support that was not correct in 1997 a very large study called the nurses health study out of harvard showed that no matter how much fat you ate it wasn't related to the risk of heart disease in 2001 top researchers from the harvard medical school wrote it is now increasingly recognized that the low fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences we were starting to see study after study that showed that foods high in fat things like nuts avocados olive oil the mediterranean diet for example were not unhealthy they were actually extremely healthy in 2009 another published extensive review of all the literature to date showed that total amount of fat you ate the amount of saturated fat and the amount of unsaturated fat had no correlation to your risk of heart disease and the study shows that these hazard ratios are close to one which means that there's no risk or benefit with eating any of these foods other studies began to show that eating more saturated fat was actually protective against heart disease and stroke this study broke 58 000 people into five different groups quintile 1 which ate the least saturated fat and quintile 5 which ate the most saturated fat when they followed them over time the group that ate the most saturated fat had an adjusted odds ratio of about 0.7 to 0.8 meaning they had 20 to 30 percent less heart disease less stroke and less total mortality compared to those who ate the least saturated fat looking at these studies you might see that eating saturated fat might actually be protective this reflects what was called in the 1980s and 1990s the french paradox the french people were eating a lot of whole fat dairy and had a lot less heart disease than other countries so this seemed to be paradoxical if you thought that saturated fat cause heart disease how could these people eat so much saturated fat and not get heart attacks and the answer is quite clear in retrospect that the saturated fat in these natural foods was not causing heart disease and there was no paradox after all in 2017 the largest epidemiologic study was published in the landsat it covered 18 countries 135 000 people and followed them over seven years it measured how much saturated fat total fat and carbohydrates they ate and compared that to the rates of heart disease you can see that the risk of heart disease looking at total fat and saturated fat tended to go down as you ate more saturated fat when you look at carbohydrates as you ate a higher and higher percentage of your diet from carbohydrates the higher your risk of heart disease so eating the fat did not seem to lead to heart disease but eating a very high percentage of carbohydrates might in fact do that the conclusion from a review by these heart specialists of all the evidence that has accumulated over the last 50 years is that eating more natural fats and natural saturated fats such as might be recommended in the keto diet for example is not going to lead to more heart disease but in fact could be protective against stroke and if you're doing well with it and losing weight there's no reason to think that you're going to have unhealthy consequences whole fat dairy has also been linked to less diabetes so as opposed to our previous recommendation of making sure you ate low-fat dairy if you eat full-fat cheese full-fat milk it does not lead to an increased risk of heart disease but could protect you against something like diabetes which does raise your risk of heart disease and that's why the ketogenic diet has been favored by some physicians thanks for watching if you learned something maybe share with your friends they might learn something too if you liked it please hit the like button and i'll see you next week

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 358,543

Keywords: keto diet, saturated fat, jason fung, dr jason fung, healthy diet, keto diet plan, low carb diet, keto diet for beginners, keto diet plan for weight loss, keto diet results, keto diet explained, keto diet meals, keto diet for begginers, keto diet meal plan, Keto diet recipes

Id: s1l8Rq4ywQ8

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021