Word: fatted
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...Fat has been a staple of the human diet since our remote ancestors started eating meat more than 2 million years ago. In the 1960s, however, researchers began to notice that patients who had elevated blood levels of cholesterol--a fatty substance found in meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products--also tended to suffer from heart disease. Cholesterol by-products would form thick, tough deposits, called plaques, on the inner walls of arteries, stiffening them and then starving the heart of blood and creating choke points where a clot could stop the flow entirely...
...became keeping cholesterol levels in the blood under control and not necessarily keeping the cholesterol out of the diet. But how to do it? Again the key seemed to be eating less red meat, cream and butter, but it was based not so much on cholesterol as on saturated fat. Reason: saturated fat increases blood cholesterol. So eggs, high in cholesterol but not in saturated fat, were taken off the forbidden list, except for those people with the most serious cholesterol problems...
...benign foods like vegetable and peanut oils and hydrogenating them--a process that stiffens them to make stick margarine, peanut butter and solid shortening--transforms them into substances known as trans-fatty acids, which can drive LDL and triglyceride levels through the roof. Trans-fatty acids are not technically fats, which means, astonishingly, that a food labeled FAT FREE may be bursting with stuff that can give you heart disease. The fact that stick margarine is bad doesn't mean butter is suddenly good. Says Dr. Walter Willett, head of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health: "I think...
...about staying away from fat entirely? Bad idea. The body needs fats, in part because vitamins like A and D must be dissolved in fat to enter the body or even move about within the body. What about the super-low-fat diets, advocated by people like Dr. Dean Ornish, director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif. (see box)? They seem to work but perhaps not because they're low fat; the key may be the types of foods--beans, grains, vegetables, instead of meats and cheeses--that Ornish recommends. Indeed, Mediterranean men, who get more than...
...triglycerides aren't quite the whole story either. Over the past few years, researchers have identified yet another form of fat that could rightly be labeled Bad Cholesterol II. Called lipoprotein (a), or Lp(a), it behaves like LDL in the body. But because Lp(a) levels have more to do with your genes than your diet, they can't easily be controlled. At best, doctors think they can use Lp(a) screening to find people who should be working extra hard to reduce their other heart-attack risks...