Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to release guidance urging Americans eat more saturated fatcontradictory decades of dietary advice and alarming experts.
“My response and kind of advice to myself was to stay calm and see what happens because there was no indication of how, why or when this potential shift would happen,” said Cheryl Anderson, a board member of the American Heart Association and a professor at the University of California, School of Public Health and Longevity Sciences in San Diego.
“The saturated fat recommendation has been one of the most consistent recommendations since the first edition of the Dietary Guidelines.”
Although Ronald Krauss, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has extensively researched saturated fat, has found that saturated fat may be less harmful than previously thought, he believes that if “[Kennedy] is actually going to come out and say we should eat more saturated fat, I think that's really the wrong message.”
Kennedy noted that the new dietary guidelines “will emphasize the need to eat saturated fats from dairy, good meats, fresh meats and vegetables… When we publish them, it will give everyone the rationale for introducing them into our schools,” according to a recent report in Hill.
Krauss's research shows that “saturated fat is relatively neutral” compared to what scientists believed in the past.
His research has shown that cutting back on saturated fat is only beneficial if you replace it with the right foods. Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats, such as olive oil and “polyunsaturated fats from other plant sources, may indeed improve metabolic health and reduce the risk of heart disease, but that doesn't mean saturated fats are necessarily bad,” Krauss said. His research also found that replacing saturated fat with sugar and carbohydrates may actually increase the risk of heart disease.
Krauss said recommendations that set a specific threshold level for saturated fat, such as the current 10% standard, tend to be arbitrary.
But, as Anderson explained, “If you don't pay as much attention to where you draw the line around the amount of saturated fat, you will see that the more saturated fat a population consumes, the higher the risk of high cholesterol, the more people develop cardiovascular disease.”
While Anderson agrees with Krauss that what people eat instead of saturated fat is important, she disagrees that saturated fat itself is “neutral.”
“If you look at the current American diet, it is too high in saturated fat and therefore does not currently have a neutral effect on our population,” she said.
However, Anderson and Krauss agree that dietary recommendations need to move away from focusing on specific nutrients such as saturated fat.
“People don't eat nutrients. They eat food,” Anderson explained. “When you ask someone what they should have eaten, they don't tell you, 'I had fat, or I had carbs, or I had protein.'
Focusing on food rather than nutrients is not only less confusing to the public, but also more scientifically sound, Krauss said. For example, there is ample evidence that consumption of meat, especially processed red meat, is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Now the question is, is it due to saturated fat or other properties of this meat? And we really don't have an answer to that question,” Krauss said.
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Nutrition science is difficult to study, in part because of the ethical and practical issues associated with conducting clinical trials.
“It is impossible to justify any institutional review board asking people to consume large amounts of high-saturated fat foods for 20 years to determine whether it has an effect on heart disease,” Krauss said. Because of this, nutrition researchers must collect long-term observational data, which can be more difficult to interpret.
Typically, Anderson said, dietary recommendations take years to develop. It's not normal for the HHS Secretary to change them overnight. Every five years, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee publishes Dietary Guidelines for Americans report based on a thorough review of the latest research. The latest version of that report has not yet been released, but “it was expected to contain recommendations for the period from 2025 to 2030,” Anderson said, adding that the current administration does not appear to be following normal protocol.
Krauss said it appears the report is “in some ways being scrapped” and he's not sure what Kennedy's recommendation will ultimately look like. He noted that this could have a direct impact on the composition of school lunches and military rations, especially if the level of saturated fat in these meals rises to 18-19%.
According to the US Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health, the recommended content allowed in both school lunches and military rations currently account for less than or equal to 10% of total calories from saturated fat.
“This could certainly have an adverse effect on cholesterol levels in the population and is predicted to affect the risk of cardiovascular disease,” he explained.
Krauss continued: “This guy cherry-picks the evidence. Some of the things he says are consistent with what I consider to be responsible recommendations regarding processed foods, etc., but then it gets mixed in with something else that makes it seem like the entire recommendation is evidence-based, which is simply not true.”
