lYup, that's right. A ot of the anti-fat thing is based on old research that's been called into question. Just like the "egg" research which came out around 1980 and claimed that 4 eggs per week was enough cholestrol to knock you dead of a heart attack by age 40. This was clearly wrong.
They used to believe that saturated fat was the main cause of heart disease. Used to, unless they have their head in the sand. Saturated fat intake and heart disease have gone in opposite directions. In the first half of the 20th century, Americans at a lot more saturated fat than the postwar period, yet cardiovasular disease was rare. In African tribes where they eat nothing but read meat and milk, heart disease is virtually unknown. There's just no evidence to back up the idea that eating saturated fat is a killer.
Look at the American diet since 1970. Late 60's early 70's was when the "saturated fat is the source of all heart disease" thing became the standard belief. Since then, per-capita saturated fat intake has fallen in absolute terms:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5304a3.htmDuring 1971--2000, a statistically significant increase in average energy intake occurred (Table). For men, average energy intake increased from 2,450 kcals to 2,618 kcals (p<0.01), and for women, from 1,542 kcals to 1,877 kcals (p<0.01).[...] In addition, the percentage of kcals from saturated fat decreased from 13.5% to 10.9% (p<0.01) for men and from 13.0% to 11.0% (p<0.01) for women.
Well, for just men 13.5% of 2450 kcals is ~331 kcals from saturated fat in 1971, and 10.9% of 2618 is 285 kcals from saturated fat in 2000. That's a significant drop not just in the percentage of saturated fat in the diet, but also the total amount. Yet heart disease skyrocketed between 1970 and 2000.
http://www.menshealth.com/health/saturated-fatSuppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat -- about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.
In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease.
Scientists, confused by the finding, argued that the tribe must have certain genetic protections against developing high cholesterol. But when British researchers monitored a group of Masai men who moved to Nairobi and began consuming a more modern diet, they discovered that the men's cholesterol subsequently skyrocketed.
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