To ask what the consensus is on saturated fat?

The science world and the health authorities are often at odds.

Personally, it seems saturated fat might not be as bad as we thought but just in case I use cold pressed virgin oils, olive or rapeseed, and sometimes tiny amounts of coconut oil and butter.

I'm not sure YouTube is helpful but I like the authors giles yeo and gary taube. The later thinks sugar might cause high cholesterol but it's early days for that hypothesis.

A friend of mine had a health check and was told he had really high cholesterol and blood pressure and has a risk of of heart disease from his family. The advice was to cut out red meat and dairy as much as possible. So he did, including swapping milk for plant based and butter for marg.
He was really strict with it and when he went back for a follow up they were really impressed with how much he had reduced both. So the NHS at least still seems to be advising to cut them out.
Zoe isn't keen on red meat or butter either. Margarines seem to have a better score which is a little surprising given they are highly processed. Milk and cheese don't seem so bad.
I did a diet and exercise programme via a PT. I was encouraged to eat a wide variety of lean meat, along with chicken and seafood. But dairy was cut out altogether.

So the consensus seems to largely be the same as before. I think I trust these sources more than idiots on TicToc eating slabs of butter!

No, that's not true:

There are also 2 types of fat – saturated and unsaturated. Avoid foods containing high levels of saturated fat, as they increase levels of LDL cholesterol in your blood.

You should aim to follow a Mediterranean-style diet. This means eating more wholegrain bread, rice and pasta, and fruit, vegetables and fish, and less meat.

Replace butter and cheese with products based on vegetable and plant oil, such as olive oil.

preventing a heart attack - NHS (www.nhs.uk)

Watch: What is the Mediterranean diet? - Heart Matters - BHF

You’re right that we are not all the same, and because of this there are no easy answers - you have to see what works best for you.

For example I can easily manipulate my cholesterol levels, if I eat high levels of carbs like biscuits my LDL drops. No-one would say that was healthy, but if I did that and my GP saw my results he’d say it was wonderful.

The shortest truth I can give is that people should eat like people ate a long time ago, eating real un-processed food. Bread we buy in the shops is not the same as bread that our ancestors made for example, even the flour is radically different.

Trans fats are far worse than saturated fat, possibly the most unhealthy food in the world is french fries.

Watch Zoe Harcombe and Nina Teicholz, both look at the data behind the healthy eating guidelines. They are both very informative.

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The NHS and UK health guidance is woefully out of date I’m afraid.

By about 30 years. It’s been shown that Robert Lustig was right and Ancel Keys was a fraud. Of course all the advice we are told to follow is a result of Ancel Keys.

You can’t even get modern up to date cholesterol tests on the NHS, such as LDL-p, LP(a) or cholesterol sub-fraction tests. In the UK you have to go private for these. Basically large LDL is healthy, having lots of small particles is potentially unhealthy - but only if the arterial wall is damaged.

More progressive countries often have these tests as standard (Denmark, Australia etc).

Things won’t change quickly, there is too much money involved such as big-pharma selling statins and a food industry that pumps sugar into so much processed food (when they were told to take fat out of food, the food ended up tasting like cardboard so they replaced fat with sugar to make it edible).

25% of people who have heart attacks have low cholesterol for example.

As a heart attack survivor myself I have made it my business to research deeply, including reading the studies that people often quote and understand how to read statistical risks due to my professional background.

Basically it is now well understood for example that athersclerosis is not caused by dietary fat, but primarily by things like smoking and highly elevated blood sugar levels (think about the shear rate of liquids - blood with high blood sugar levels is more abrasive and over time damages the arteries).

Saturated fat is not the major issue according to my consultant cardiologist, he says even keto diets are fine (I’m more a low-carb higher-protein mediterranean myself).

Just had all my lipids done and I now have high HDL, low trigs, lower LDL (due to the statins) almost the lowest possible score with the inflammation markers I had to get done privately. Still awaiting the results of my sub-fraction tests to see if I have genetically high LP(a) or small particles.

25% of people have genetically high LP(a) - this is a small LDL variant that can’t be recycled so builds up. Lifestyle changes will not significantly affect LP(a) levels and neither do statins. So if you are on statins due to having high LDL - but in reality youtr high LDL is actually genetically high LP(a) then you are wasting your time as far as cholesterol levels is concerned.

If you have athersclerosis, then you likely have a massive inflammatory problem, but by eradicating sugar and flour from your diet the inflammation will reduce allowing the body to heal. The biggest actual benefit of statin drugs is that they reduce inflammation in your arteries, the cholesterol reduction is really neither here nor there as far as absolute risk is concerned - the only people to get an all-cause mortality benefit from statins is ladies over the age of 80.

The biggest marker used mostly by those at the top of the game on the lipid / athersclerosis is the ApoA1 : ApoB1 ratio not LDL-c value.

Having said all that it makes sense to eat healthy fats where possible, eat fish weekly for example.

Basically people that have eaten lots of saturated fat and gone on to have problems are the people that ignored ALL lifestyle advice, they usually did no exercise, ate lots so were overweight, smoked and drank loads (alcohol causes big blood sugar level swings) - and had bread buns around their fast-food burgers. The saturated fat in the meat wasn’t the problem - it was correlated as it was eaten but not causative. The meat is no better or worse than the lettuce and tomato in the burger. It was the smoking, drinking, sugar/flour and no exercise that was the problem.

but DYOR and trust no-one, and rememeber your GP has had zero training in nutrition.

I'd be going with unprocessed foods, vegetarian and fish 80% of the time.

Meat should be organic and unprocessed.

Tons of veg, eggs, fruit, lentils etc.

Pragmatically I suspect one of the problems with saturated fats is they're tasty and calorific so, within the amount of energy each of us needs each day they may leave less room for other more beneficial nutrients.

Balance, variety, and moderation in everything (except colourful veg, I defy anyone to say you can have too much of those) is my prediction for future nutrition recommendations.

I think I would really struggle to believe that margarine is in any way healthier than butter.

And before someone comes back with something ridiculous, I'm talking about in moderation, not liquifying cups of butter and drinking it.

According to the health guru on the diabetes prevention programme I did last year, saturated fats are not as bad as was originally thought.

I’m not disputing the benefits of the well researched Mediterranean diet, however, if you look on the BHF and NHS guidelines, this diet is classed as too high daily fat allowance, even though it’s healthy fats.

In answer to your question then maybe a big bible type book of Nutrition and what the human body and brain needs to function. It will likely explain in a more scientific way how we process fats, protein, various vitamins and minerals etc and then you can see for yourself what to eat and why. I expect it will be a good balance of everything which is I think the conclusion you have already come to.

It’s a minefield and like you OP, the research is so polarised.

The research actually isn't polarised. The (traditional) Mediterranean diet - which is low in saturated fat and animal fats, and high in plant fibre and in olive oil which contains monounsaturated fats - is one of the most researched diets in the world and is regarded as the healthiest diet in the world.

It’s a minefield and like you OP, the research is so polarised.

I eat a Mediterranean diet and have done for some years - so olive oil, meat maybe once a month at a push, but mainly pulses, beans and fish, very little UPF and yet still I have high cholesterol..

I think a diet which is high in any one particular food group is problematic, and then overlying that with to much artificially made food is also bad.
So I think that saturated fat is preferable to trans fats, but eating a smaller amount of fat than I do would certainly do me good!