Dietary saturated fats increases longevity more than PUFA

[Mauritio]

Interesting study on the influence of various fatty acids on longevity in mice on calorie restriction (with a few caveats).

The mice eating saturated fats lived the longest followed by the high omega 6 group and the high omega 3 group. So there is a perfect correlation between the degree of saturation of the dietery fats and the longevity of the animals.
The life span of the SFA group was about 4 % longer than the of the omega 6 group and about 11% longer than the life span of the omega 3 group.

However: they used lard as a model for saturated fats, which is suboptimal, since the lard they used was about 40% SFA, 40% MUFA and 20% PUFA, so a diet representative for saturated fats contains 60% unsaturated fatty acids?! Why not use coconut oil or even hydrogenated coconut oil. I would have liked to see the resulsts with those.
Another caveat is that they were on calorie restriction. A SFA diet will lead to an increase in metabolic rate a.ka. calories burned which can lead to probelms if calrories are restriced, unlike a MUFA/PUFA-heavy diet which animals eat to lower their metabolism for hibernation.

Virtually all studies on longevity and fats show inferiority of omega 6 and especially omega 3 fatty acids compared to SFA; the data is surpsingly clear ( I have posted some studies on that before ). And its pretty hard to argue with longevity as a factor of health, especially when saturated fats show benefits in many other areas of health as well. The only issue is that you cant make such studies with humans and mice might react slightly different, but I doubt humans would react completely different, although I suspect the changes would be less significant.

"Life span was increased (p < .02) in all three CR groups compared to the Control group. Median life span was increased (p < .001) by 31.7% (CR lard), 27.5% (CR soy), and 20.3% (CR fish) in the CR mice compared to the control animals (Table 3)."

The Influence of Dietary Fat Source on Life Span in Calorie Restricted Mice

Calorie restriction (CR) without malnutrition extends life span in several animal models. It has been proposed that a decrease in the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), and especially n-3 fatty acids, in membrane phospholipids may contribute ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[cremes]

I know human studies in these areas are few and far between due to so-called ethics. We see plenty of unethical behavior in pharma sciences so why is a human study using a non-chemical nutrient, eg. Saturated fat, impossible to test for?

If test subjects are fully informed, why can’t they sign up for a study like that? The downsides are small.

I’ve seen old threads here talking about crowd funding some studies. I also have seen posts about @haidut and Co doing some original research. All of it has come to nothing. Sigh.

N = 1 then, I guess.