Many nutritionists, having known for decades that saturated fat, found in
abundance in red meat and dairy products, raises blood cholesterol levels that
are in turn associated with a high risk of coronary heart disease, have fallen
Line victim to the temptation of simplifying dietary recommendations to facilitate
(5) public nutrition education. After decades of promoting the consumption of all
complex carbohydrates and eschewing all fats and oils, much of this theory has
been discredited.
Controlled feeding studies in which the participants eat carefully prescribed
diets for several weeks substantiated that saturated fat increases cholesterol
(10) levels, and that polyunsaturated fat-found in vegetable oils and fish-reduces
cholesterol. Dietary advice should therefore emphasize the replacement of
saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, not total fat reduction. The subsequent
doubling of polyunsaturated fat consumption that this advice might inspire could
potentially contribute to a halving of coronary heart disease rates.
(15) Indeed, the argument that fat in general is to be avoided has been hastily
extrapolated from observations that affluent Western countries have both high intakes
of fat and high rates of coronary heart disease. This correlation is limited to saturated
fat, however, for societies in which people eat relatively large portions of
monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat (whose health benefits are nearly identical)
(20) tend to have lower rates of heart disease. On the Greek island of Crete, for
instance, where the traditional diet contained much olive oil, a rich source of
monounsaturated fat, and fish, a source of polyunsaturated fat, fat constituted
40 percent of the calories in this diet, but the rate of heart disease was lower
than the rate for those who followed the traditional diets of Japan, where fat
(25) composes only 8 to 10 percent of the calories. Furthermore, international
comparisons of overall fat intake can be misleading: many negative influences
on health, such as smoking, physical inactivity and high amounts of body fat,
are also correlated with Western affluence. Many nutritionists decided it would
be too difficult to educate the public about these subtleties, instead advocating a
(30) clear, simple message that fat was insalubrious.
The wisdom of this practice has further come into question as researchers
discover that the two main cholesterol-carrying chemicals, low-density
lipoprotein (LDL), and high-density lipoprotein (HDL), have very different
effects on the risk of coronary heart disease, such that increasing the ratio of
(35) LDL to HDL in the blood raises the risk, whereas decreasing the ratio has the
opposite effect. Unfortunately, certain controlled feeding studies have shown
that when a person replaces calories from saturated fat with an equal amount of
calories from carbohydrate-rich polyunsaturated fats, not only the levels of LDL
and total cholesterol diminish, but also the level of HDL, and thus in only a
(40) limited reduction in risk accrues from shifting to a polyunsaturated fat diet.
With which of the following statements concerning the tradi

A. They have erred by publicly presenting the dietary model of the Japanese as healthier than that of the Greeks.
By advocating the avoidance of vegetable oils and fish, they could potential contribute to a fifty percent reduction in coronary heart disease rates.
C. They have tended to overemphasize the dangers of fat consumption at the expense of subtle but important distinctions among categories of fats.
D. They have afforded too much importance to non-dietary negative influences on Western health.
E. They have failed to observe the similarity of effects resulting from the consumption of low and high density lipoproteins.