What Doctors Need to Know About Fat

As physicians, many of us were trained to tell our patients that eating cholesterol and fat – especially saturated fat– causes heart attacks, and that taking statin drugs provide a powerful way to reduce your risk of getting them. But is this really true? One of the biggest refuse-to-die myths is that dietary and cholesterol levels are the enemy, and a high-fat diet causes heart attacks. Yet study after study shows no connection between total fat, saturated fat, or dietary cholesterol and heart disease. One review of 72 studies comprising almost 600,000 people found no link between total or saturated fat and heart disease, but they did find that trans-fats were clearly harmful and that omega-3 fats were beneficial. What we don’t hear enough about are the many studies that show that most people who have heart attacks actually have normal cholesterol levels. Because we have statins and other drugs that lower cholesterol, it’s easy to ignore prevention and just lean on these tools when situations turn dire. What we need to focus on instead, however, is what we can do to reduce the risk for heart attack.