Hi Derek if you still believe that saturated fats are the culpable of causing heart disease. That is no impediment for a LCHF diet there is still plenty of evidence of benefits in reducing carbs and you can make a low carb diet without it being high in saturated fats or omega-6. Dr. William Davis a cardiologist and proponent of LCHF has program with this type of diet, so there is no reason not to follow a LCHF diet. The benefits for a diabetic are pretty clear there is no controversy possible. Also healthy fats aren't really that much more expensive than bad fats. Even if they will cost a little more they still can save you a lot of money in health care and medications.
Plus you should be aware of the following "paradox"; (You can read more here:
http://www.artandscienceoflowcarb.com/the-sad-saga-of-saturated-fat/ )
Two generations of researchers have tried to prove that eating saturated fat causes heart disease. Rather than growing stronger, as would be the case if this hypothesis were rock-solid, increasingly the scientific data is painting a picture more akin to ‘low fat Swiss cheese’ (i.e., not much there besides the holes). Take, for example, multiple recent meta-analyses of large populations followed carefully for decades, examining what they eat and what they die of [1-4] All show no consistent association between dietary saturated fat intake and risk for heart disease or death from all causes. In fact some of these studies show just the opposite – an inverse association of dietary saturated fat intakes and atherosclerosis or stroke. Interestingly, they also suggest that one’s risk for a coronary event increases when dietary saturated fat is reduced and replaced by carbohydrate.
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So, you may be asking, if consumption of saturated fat is not associated with harmful effects on the body, does this mean that this class of fats is completely off the hook? Our response is that the science of nutrition is pretty complex, so beware of black and white answers. Whereas dietary saturated fat intake is unrelated to risk for chronic disease, higher saturated fat levels in the blood do appear to pose a problem. As we noted, there is a lot of variation between individuals in their responses to any one diet. Thus there is an unmet need for tests that will guide individuals to the correct amounts of both carbohydrates and saturated fat to match their personal metabolic tolerances.
In addition to the studies mentioned above in which high carbohydrate feeding increased blood levels of saturated fats, we have also conducted a pair of studies [18, 19] comparing moderate carbohydrate to very low carbohydrate diets. Because these were not very low calorie diets, the low carb diets were naturally pretty high in fat, containing 2-3 fold greater intakes of saturated fat than the moderate carbohydrate diets used as controls. The results were pretty striking – compared to low fat diets, blood levels of saturated fat were markedly decreased in response to the low carbohydrate, high fat diets. Our data indicates that this occurred because the low insulin levels accelerated the oxidation of all fats (and particularly saturated fat); plus the relative paucity of dietary carbohydrate meant there wasn’t much of it to be converted into saturated fats. Thus, from the body’s perspective, a low carbohydrate diet reduces blood saturated fat levels irrespective of dietary saturated fat intake.
Now once we post this explanation of how saturated fats got such a bad rap, we know that we will get angry pushback from those advocates of low fat, high carb diets asking about all of the studies in rats and mice showing that high fat diets are bad for ‘you’ (by which they mean those rodents – not you personally). To that we offer two answers. First, rodents make lousy surrogates for human metabolism. A myriad of drug and nutrient studies show dramatically different responses between mice and men. Second, most researchers who study ‘high fat diets’ in mice use 40-60% fat and 20-40% carbs (leaving about 20% for the protein). Even at 20% carbs, this is still way too much to allow a mouse to adapt to fat burning like humans do when they get their carbs at or below 10% of dietary energy. As a result, at huge tax-payer expense, these many ‘intermediate carb’ studies tell us nothing useful about the human response to a well-formulated low carbohydrate diet.
And so we end this sad saga about poor, downtrodden saturated fats on a hopeful note. Yes, dietary saturated fat continues to be scapegoated as the presumptive cause of many health problems in developed countries. However we now know that nutrition policy makers have indicted the wrong nutrient for the crime of raising blood saturated fat levels. If we can just banish the phrase ‘you are what you eat’, however, perhaps the nutrition establishment would broaden their perspective to consider how other offenders determine blood saturated fat levels and contribute to overall health and disease.
There is convincing evidence that dietary carbohydrate exerts an important influence on how the body processes saturated fat. Thus, saturated fat, whether made in the body or eaten in the diet, is more likely to accumulate when aided and abetted by high levels of dietary carbohydrate, particularly in insulin resistant individuals (as in type-2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome). Especially in these substantial segments of our population, a one-size-fits-all recommendation to aggressively lower saturated intake with the expectation of lowering blood saturated fat levels is intellectually invalid and likely to backfire. Given our current epidemics of obesity and diabetes, we can’t afford to continue diet policies based on a tragically flawed, simplistic sound-bite.