Sure. But what is known about atherosclerosis is that plaques are not _on_ the arterial wall, but _inside_ the arterial wall. For plagues to form, fats have to be pulled into the arterial wall. How does this happen? Inflammation as designed opens up the arterial wall as a way to allow immune cells passage. Atherosclerosis happens when you have a bunch of fat in your arteries and you open them up to go inside. That's why cheeseburgers and pizza are the perfect heart disease vectors (Western diet). The bread parts cause inflammation via innate immunity (saccharomyces receptors) and the saturated fat parts (cheese and meat) flow in.
Thanks for providing some scientific literacy to my argument. The western diet is designed around eating fatty foods wrapped around some innately-inflammatory bread product. If I was trying to give myself arterial plaque I would eat something that causes inflammation (yeast) and at the same time eat lots of fat. It boggles my mind how researches have failed to synthesize that yeast is the cause of so much disease.
From the paper... "Thus, an important mechanism by which reductions in dietary saturated fatty acids decrease LDL-cholesterol in humans..."
unsaturated (e.g., polyunsaturated) fats do not have the same association.
There are now many studies and papers linking saturated fat to increased LDL cholesterol. This is why groups, like the American Heart Association, recommend low intake of saturated fats (20 grams per day or less).
It’s not at all clear that LDL is actually bad. Some studies show that LDL is inversely correlated with all cause mortality. That is, the lower your LDL, the sooner you die.
Did you look at the study, the details, the limitations, how info was collected, and so forth? I just did a quick read. The data set they're working with is incomplete and poor. It also deals with LDL levels while only looking at baseline and takes no account in for people on drugs to alter it.
So much detail is missing, poor, or uncontrolled for that it's only good to show you published, have something on your resume, and use to justify more research could be useful in the space.
I don't disagree. It's actually my belief that most nutritional and health science is likely bunk. Partially, it is for the same reasons there is a lot of bad science, which you touch on. But it also has it worse than other fields - look how bad a lot of CS papers are, where you're dealing with a domain that is, relatively speaking, one in which you can generate immediate, obvious, and empirically demonstrable results. Now, imagine a field dealing with the most intricate and complex system known to man, where actual clear, concrete results may take decades to manifest, there are zillions of confounding factors, the code is insane spaghetti, truly controlled experiments are practically impossible, and every individual is slightly different and may operate differently. It's really a field where can have very little practical faith that it will ever be much good, but we can hope.
That's why I prefer for myself to hold to heuristics. We have good life expectancy and diet data going back a long time. We can see, for example, various periods and places where, excluding childhood mortality, people lived as long or longer than they do now - remarkable and slightly horrifying, considering the advances in medical science in the past 50-70 years. This included peoples with diets high in saturated fats. The best practical advise you can give anyone, I believe, is simply to eat traditional foods your ancestors have eaten for hundreds of years, and to therefore avoid anything prepared, sticking to fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and meats. And if at all possible, try to get the food you buy grown in a closer-to-traditional matter; ruminants should eat grass, not soy and corn, for example; oats, if possible, should not have been treated with Roundup. And naturally, whatever your diet, do not let yourself get overweight and try to maintain a high level of productive physical activity (of course, unproductive is better than none at all!)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18163971/