 Imagine you worked in the now defunct Twinkie Division of Hostess Foods and wanted to take the tobacco industry tact of not just downplaying the risk of your product, but actually promoting it as healthy. How would you do that? Well, your first problem is that it has 2.5 grams of saturated fat, so that's going to raise cholesterol, the number one risk factor of our number one killer, heart disease. How are we going to get around that? Well, what if you designed a study in which you took a bunch of people eating your arch rival, little Debbie cloud cakes? Now they only have one gram each, so what if you took a group of people eating five cloud cakes a day, five grams of saturated fat, and then cut that saturated fat intake in half by switching them to eating one Twinkie a day? What would happen to their cholesterol levels? Cutting saturated fat consumption in half their cholesterol would go down. So technically, they went from zero Twinkies a day to one Twinkie a day, and their cholesterol went down. You publish it and crank out a press release. New research shows that eating a Twinkie a day can be good for heart health by improving cholesterol levels. The media takes your press release, runs with it, consumers can eat a Twinkie every day if they choose and feel confident that science supports Twinkie's healthy benefits, which now include cholesterol-lowering effects. Twinkies, you just proved with science, have cholesterol-lowering effects. To outlandish a scenario, check it out. This study, bought and paid for by the beef industry, added beef to people's diets, but at the same time removed so much poultry, pork, fish, and cheese from their diet that they halved their saturated fat intake from 12% of their diet down to 6% of their diet. So of course their cholesterol went down. If your diet goes from 12% saturated fat down to 6% saturated fat, it doesn't matter if that 6% comes from beef, chicken, lard, or Twinkies. If you cut your total saturated fat in half, your cholesterol will follow. Especially if you eat more fiber and vegetable protein, as they did here. They conclude, the results of the bold study standing for beef in an optimal lean diet provide convincing evidence that lean beef can be included in a heart-healthy diet that meets current dietary recommendations and reduces cardiovascular disease risk. Crisco could be included, Krispy Kreme could be included, as long as you cut your total saturated fat intake. What they've failed to mention is that risk would drop even lower if you also dropped the beef, as was pointed out by the chair of nutrition at Harvard, who's previously pointed out that plant sources of protein are preferable. The subjects in the study went from a high risk of dying from heart disease to a high risk of dying from heart disease. Remember we need to get our LDL, bad cholesterol, down to 50, 60, or 70 and become essentially heart attack proof. And for most people that means eliminating saturated animal fat and cholesterol intake completely. This study is really just showing how bad saturated fat is from any animal source. Yes, based on saturated fat levels, lean beef is often better than chicken and Twinkies. But that's like touting the health benefits of Coca-Cola because it has less sugar than Pepsi. It does. 16 spoonfuls of sugar per bottle instead of 15. Doesn't mean we wouldn't be better not consuming soda at all. Reminds me of this study. Cheese intake lowers cholesterol compared to butter. Yet, here's the release, right? That's how they ended up with the cholesterol-lowering effects of beef. If you cut out enough poultry, pork, fish, and cheese from your diet, you could get cholesterol-lowering effects from nearly anything.