Although a diet loaded with fats might be beneficial to a healthy
person’s cholesterol levels, a study suggested extremely
limiting fats from the diet could produce the opposite effect.
Researchers who studied a group of 11 healthy individuals who
led sedentary lifestyles noticed a drop in their HDL cholesterol,
which was the "good" cholesterol thought to lower the
risks of heart disease.
These findings suggested that a sufficient amount of fat intake
could be a key factor to warding off heart disease by elevating
the HDL levels.
Based on these findings, experts recommended moderate fat intake
as part of the diet and getting approximately 30 percent to 35
percent of calories in the diet from fat. While it has been believed
that saturated fats were responsible for raising "bad"
LDL cholesterol levels, experts now say that unhealthy cholesterol
levels might be caused by the combination of excess fats and too
many calories.
Results from the study also revealed that those following the
diet high in fat were provided with around the same number of
calories as those who were adhering to the regular diets.
The low-fat diet participants lost a small amount of weight,
however their HDL levels were much lower than the high-fat participants.
In addition to these findings, the LDL levels of the high-fat
dieters did not exceed the levels of those following the regular
diets.
When we talked about high cholesterol in previous sections, we
really concentrated on the levels of total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol,
and LDL cholesterol. We’re going to change our focus now
that we’re talking about diet and consider ALL fats, particularly
saturated fats, in addition to cholesterol
