Rethinking Fat: The Case For Adding Some Into Your Diet

Rethinking Fat: The Case For Adding Some Into Your Diet Enlarge this image toggle caption Stacy Spensley/Flickr Stacy Spensley/Flickr Remember the fat-free boom that swept the country in the 1990s? "We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease," Willett says. "There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines," Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat. There's now evidence that — compared with carbs — saturated fat can raise HDL cholesterol and lower trigylcerides in the blood, which are both countering effects to heart disease, he says. "When you put all of this together," says Mozaffarian, what you see is that saturated fat has a relatively neutral effect compared with carbs.