I'm familiar with the usual arguments made by Gary Taubes and others in the pro-saturated fat camp.
 
Unfortunately, when it's pointed out that most studies damn diets high in cooked animal foods as being the most unhealthy ,their most common argument, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, is that it's all a vast UFO-like conspiracy by the scientific establishment, which is somewhat unlikely given the multitude of data supporting that POV. Gary Taubes does make a good point in stating that the definitions/conclusions made by most scientists in the field of food-science have been seriously misleading, though the data is solid enough. For example, in many such studies it is not made clear at all(except (sometimes) in the fine print) that the animal foods the scientists are studying are almost always highly processed such as smoked meats/intensively-farmed grainfed meat from fast-food outlets instead of natural, grassfed meats etc., whereas studies on vegan diets generally involve vegetables that have been only lightly processed/cooked(eg:- steamed).
 
 
Plus, the usual conclusions versus saturated fats may also be due to a simple faulty assumption:-
"Another confounding issue may be the formation of exogenous (outside the body) advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and oxidation products generated during cooking, which it appears some of the studies have not controlled for. It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-(saturated)fat foods may be in part due to the high content in (heat-created) glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." The glycotoxins, as he called them, are more commonly called AGEs:-
http://www.pnas.org/content/94/12/6474
 
 
Geoff> Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:08:21 -0600> From: [log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Meat intake and meat preparation in relation to risk of postmenopausal breast ca> To: [log in to unmask]> > On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:01:12 -0600, Geoffrey Purcell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:> >> >I'm afraid 1 study or overview of studies doesn't really prove anything. > > Read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and you'll start to question whether any study proves anything, and whether you would ever hear about it if it did.> > -- > Robert Kesterson> [log in to unmask]
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