Saturated fat and cardiovascular disease controversy

Whether saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease is a question with numerous controversial views. Although most in the mainstream heart-health, government, and medical communities hold that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, some hold contrary beliefs.

Medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization, the American Dietetic Association, the Dietitians of Canada, the British Dietetic Association,American Heart Association, the British Heart Foundation, the World Heart Federation, the British National Health Service, the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the European Food Safety Authority advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and recommend dietary limits on saturated fats as one means of reducing that risk.

The initial connection between arteriosclerosis and cholesterol was made by the Russian pathologist Nikolay Anichkov, prior to World War I. Another significant contribution to the debate was made by the Dutch physician (internist) Cornelis de Langen, who noticed the correlation between nutritional cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones (and soon after, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases") in the Javanese population in 1916. De Langen reported on his findings at the conference of the International Society of Geographic Pathology in 1935. These observations were made on patients admitted to the municipal hospital in Jakarta. Consequently, he studied this phenomenon in defined populations outside the hospital. He showed that the traditional Javanese diet, very poor in cholesterol and other lipids, was associated with a low level of blood cholesterol as well as a low incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), while the prevalence of CVD in Europeans in Java, living on the Western diet, was significantly higher. De Langen's colleague, Isidor Snapper, made a similar observation in North China in 1940. Since de Langen published his results only in Dutch, his work remained unknown to most of the international scientific community.

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