Eat More Butter, Eggs, and Saturated Fat

In 1953, the American scientist Dr. Ancel Keys published a paper linking high saturated fat intake with heart disease in adult men. Though initially met with skepticism, medical societies, and government bodies eventually embraced Keys’s findings, and the era of fat demonization began – much to the joy of processed food manufacturers.

Although most experts now regard Keys’s research as cherry-picked and flawed, its conclusions still influence and direct the purchasing choices of the average consumer. Many people still believe that saturated fats – even when sourced from nutritious whole foods, such as eggs and coconut oil – contribute to weight gain and heart disease, even though the evidence is starting to prove the exact opposite.

Saturated Fats Increase LDL Cholesterol Sizepublished in the journal Lipids in 2009, for instance, found that women who consumed 30 milliliters of coconut oil daily exhibited a significant reduction in abdominal fat when compared to the control group. This result has been ascribed to coconut oil’s large concentrations of medium-chain triglycerides, a form of saturated fat that our bodies metabolize with unusual rapidity.