I’ve been thinking more about the study I previously referred to that shows how butter lowers flow-mediated dilation. I mean, it’s right there in black-and-white (and free full-text) that consuming butter everyday for 3 weeks led to lower flow-mediated dilation.
However, the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated conditions led to no change in FMD. The MUFA and PUFA diets had nuts and margarine. Based on the idea of whole foods, I would suggest that the nuts being whole foods contributed to the better FMD result. But still, these two diets did contain oil, so that muddies the waters.
My refined thinking on this is that while the nuts probably played a role, I think the overall unsaturated to saturated fat ratio may play an even bigger role. Here are the diet stats from the paper:
In the previous post, I showed how the Paleo diet has a ratio of 2:1 for unsaturated to saturated fats. Let’s calculate the ratios for the three diets in the table:
- PUFA 2.7:1
- MUFA 3.3:1
- SFA 0.8:1
Quite a difference!
So could the unsaturated to saturated fat ratio make that much of a difference, that it affects FMD and possibly heart disease? Stay tuned for the next posts.