Grasa dietética y mortalidad, lo que dicen los estudios observacionales

Although dietary fat is still often talked about as a single thing, knowledge about the different types of fat is becoming more widespread, something essential since the relationship with health of each type is different. In most of my books I have dedicated many pages to explaining all these types and their possible relationships with clinical indicators.

All this information can now be completed with another meta-analysis on the topic. Is about «Association between dietary fat intake and mortality from all causes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies» (2020), published just a few weeks ago in the journal Clinical Nutrition. The authors of this research compiled existing observational studies (involving a million people) on the relationship between the intake of different types of fat (total, polyunsaturated, saturated, monounsaturated and trans) and mortality from various causes (general, cardiovascular disease and cancer), to reach general conclusions in this regard. The educational aspect of this review is that, by calculating all the results, we have calculated the curves that represent these fat intake-mortality relationships, which allows for easy-to-interpret visual representations.

Below you can see these intake and mortality risk curves, for each type of fat:

Total fats:

Total fat intake shows an inverse relationship with mortality in general, does not seem to have a relationship with cardiovascular mortality, and shows a variable relationship in the case of cancer mortality, with a slightly increasing trend in risk at the beginning but with a reduction . from 25% of the energy.

Monounsaturated fat:

In the case of monounsaturated fat (such as olive oil), the relationship is inverse for the three types of mortality risk (more intake is associated with lower risk), clearer up to an intake of 10-12% of the energy. .

Polyunsaturated fat:

As can be seen quite clearly, polyunsaturated fat is the one that presents the clearest inverse relationship with the risk of mortality of any type.

Saturated fat:

Saturated fat intake shows a positive relationship with mortality, which disappears when reaching 8-10% of the energy ingested in the case of overall and cardiovascular mortality, but continues to increase in the case of cancer mortality.

Trans fat:

In the case of trans fat the relationship seems to be complex. Regarding general mortality, the risk increases up to 2% of energy and then decreases. And with respect to cardiovascular and cancer mortality, the relationship is the opposite in each case: it increases and decreases respectively. This diversity may be related to the different effects of the different types of trans fats, something I talked about in this previous post.

Conclusions:

These are the conclusions reached by the authors:

«…diets high in total fat, monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fat were associated with lower all-cause mortality compared to low-fat diets, while diets high in saturated fat and trans fat were associated with lower increased all-cause mortality. Current dietary guidelines to reduce intake of saturated and trans fats and emphasize intake of mono- and polyunsaturated fats.»

In any case, remember that we are talking about observational studies, so we must be cautious when making deductions of causality.

And before deciding to generally reduce your intake of saturated fat, I recommend reading this previous post about what could be the best way to approach it, taking into account the nature of the foods that provide it, something important and also mentioned by the authors . of this meta-analysis. If you want to delve deeper into the topic, at this link you will find a good number of articles on saturated fat and health.
3 Comments
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