I think it is well established that you are better off with saturated fat and cholesterol heavy foods if it means no longer being obese. Since compliance with any diet is so important, it probably is healthier for people in general to not worry about saturated fat and worry more about sugars and carbs and keeping weight in check. But that doesn't mean saturated fat in your diet is an ideal you should aim for.<p>I'm partial to this explanation:<p><a href="http://www.mprize.org/blogs/archives/2010/01/hi_dr_feinman_a.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mprize.org/blogs/archives/2010/01/hi_dr_feinman_a...</a><p>>What I think we're seeing is exactly the divergence within these populations that you know: that carb is really rather bad for overweight, insulin-sensitive people, such that replacing it even with SFA is relatively harmless -- whereas for lean, insulin-sensitive people, SFA (and dietary cholesterol, its fellow-traveller in omnivorous diets) is likely more <i>relatively</i> harmful, because carb is less able to derange the metabolism. We have to remember that any time we look at these studies and see only modest or borderline-significant effects: 66% of the US population is overweight, and half of that majority is obeese; Europe is somewhat better-off, at 49.8% and 13.3% in men and 36.0 & 13.5% in women per MONICA. So the deleterious effects of any nutrient with a differential effect on low-BMI, insulin-sensitive people will tend to be blunted by the much larger number of people for whom such effects are blunted by their "larger" problem.<p>>It also means that the deleterious effects of a rise in SFA intake are at least temporarily outweighed if it is is part of a dietary shift into a lower-carb diet when it is successfully used for weight loss (as opposed to just being a person's self-selected default diet, which of course is what's going on in teh studies in Jakobsen and in the Swedish, Greek, and US Nurses low-carb/high-protein studies). But it's reasonably clear that if you're insulin-sensitive -- which, interestingly, is what one is likely to become after losing weight on a successful low-carb weight-loss diet! -- the effects of SFA become more <i>relatively</i> harmful as teh deleterious effects of carb recede.<p>>t the end of the day, we have to go with what we've got. Until we get a couple of thousand healthy twenty-year-olds locked up in metabolic wards for sixty years or so for a really vigorous diet trial, I think saturated fat AND carbs (especially starchy carbs) stand out as things to reduce in the diet, in exchange for vegetables, fruit, lean protein, and PUFA (and probably MUFA) as things to maintain or increase. And most people should lose weight!