Saturated fats are definitely manageable in small amounts. For most of history, and still in many places today, the biggest concern for an infant was getting sufficient calories, and saturated fat is a great choice for that. When you look at modern hunter-gatherer diets, they contain animal products, but in most cases they do not make up the majority of calories (exceptions usually involve lots of seafood), the meats are wild and therefore fairly lean, and BMI stays generally quite low. Under those conditions, heart disease risk is small and whether it is slightly increased by the saturated fat in one’s diet is mostly irrelevant. There is a big difference between chasing down the occasional antelope and pulling up to the drive through for a cheeseburger. So the evolutionary argument really is not strong evidence that saturated fats are harmless.
I agree that the studies we have are mostly inadequate, but I don’t think using hunter-gatherer diets as a control would be very useful either. If you change everything at once, you can’t isolate specific causal factors. What we really need (but can’t have) is a bunch of large scale trials that have many groups with many different interventions and combinations of interventions, and statistical power to distinguish outcomes between each group.
Saturated fats are definitely manageable in small amounts. For most of history, and still in many places today, the biggest concern for an infant was getting sufficient calories, and saturated fat is a great choice for that. When you look at modern hunter-gatherer diets, they contain animal products, but in most cases they do not make up the majority of calories (exceptions usually involve lots of seafood), the meats are wild and therefore fairly lean, and BMI stays generally quite low. Under those conditions, heart disease risk is small and whether it is slightly increased by the saturated fat in one’s diet is mostly irrelevant. There is a big difference between chasing down the occasional antelope and pulling up to the drive through for a cheeseburger. So the evolutionary argument really is not strong evidence that saturated fats are harmless.
I agree that the studies we have are mostly inadequate, but I don’t think using hunter-gatherer diets as a control would be very useful either. If you change everything at once, you can’t isolate specific causal factors. What we really need (but can’t have) is a bunch of large scale trials that have many groups with many different interventions and combinations of interventions, and statistical power to distinguish outcomes between each group.