Dietary “meats” and serum lipids

Abstract

The mean values for serum total cholesterol for 47 males, aged 32 to 62 yr who, over a 10 1/2 month study ate, within a self-selected diet, beef as the only meat for 3 months, poultry and fish for 3 months, and pork for 3 months showed no statistically significant difference, whereas 17 of 29 females of the same age who participated in the same study had borderline statistically significant differences in mean values (p less than 0.055). When data from all subjects were considered together, no statistically significant changes in mean serum total cholesterol or serum triglycerides were noted, but there were significant changes in mean high-density lipoprotein cholesterol values, both upward and downward. The important results of this study are documentary to the lack of influence of "meat" and its fat on effecting a significant change in serum total cholesterol within a self-selected diet.

Effects of cholesterol and fat modification of self-selected diets on serum lipids and their specific fatty acids in normocholesterolemic and hypercholesterolemic humans.

“…Throughout this study, as previously reported [13,23,24], not all changes from immediately previous blood values were in the same direction in the same person.…”

“…No significant changes in SCHOL, HDL-C, or STG were found in subjects eating food fats other than butter and margarine, such as beef, poultry/fish, and pork in a 10-month crossover design with humans consuming self-selected diets [23,24]. Reiser et al [54] studied beef fat vs coconut oil vs safflower oil incorporated into spe cial spreads, filled ice cream, and cookies, fed to human volunteers within their habitual foods taken ad lib for 5 weeks at a caloric level to maintain constant weight.…”

“…In one study we tried a washout period of 6 weeks during which subjects returned to baseline free-living dietary state before a third phase of a lO'/i-month study [24]. In that study subjects' mean SCHOL, HDL-C, and STG after "washout" of 6 weeks did not return to closely similar base values, but was 8-15 mg less than entry, which was not significant.…”

“…All had been in our longitudinal study of aging for 18 years and had previously volunteered to be in past feed ing studies during which they kept records of daily food intake [11][12][13]23,24]. The hypercholesterolemics used diet therapy only.…”

“…Plasma lipid response to ingestion of saturated fat by humans differs [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. In neutral food fats, certain saturated fatty acids (SFAs), such as stearic acid, have been reported to have no hypercholesterolemic effect [19,22,25].…”