That's begun to change. I anecdotally know a lot of people on a high-fat diet (Keto and such) and it has really worked for them. Inflammation is way down, energy is way up, weight is down, blood pressure is down, cholesterol is down, etc.
Sugars / refined starches seem to be the nutrition villains, not natural, saturated fats. (But who knows! The recommendations change almost daily, it seems.)
Anecdotally I too am moving towards LCHF/Keto and so far my health has improved drastically from primarily focusing on adding fats back in after years of carefully measured low-fat low-calorie diets did nothing for me.
Anybody who has done keto and lost weight certainly does not say they had evergy on it. Those first couple weeks are terrible and you never quite have the energy you want. Thankfully it is a short term diet with specific targets in mind. Any positive effects after stopping keto are from the weight loss in general. Even keto diets recommend against a high saturated fat content but with keto your body is in a specific state that blunts the effects of a high saturated fat intake.
When you go off keto you cannot maintain the high saturated fat intake without measurable negative impacts.
Who says it? I had more energy on keto, except for one day (around a week after starting) that felt terrible and was fixed by drinking water with salt and potassium. Keto diets don't recommend against a high saturated fat content, only some do because of the common misconception that it is bad. There are no studies showing bad effects of saturated fat by itself. It's the carbs what causes the problem, fat only makes it worse.
In the anecdotal cases I mentioned, inflammation is a catch-all. More specifically, congestion and joint pain decreased significantly. In one case, I know someone who had many days where she wasn't able to walk due to joint pain. Those days appear to be gone.
The article i posted specially attacks this. Inflammation is a symptom of many things including cancer, but isn't something you really aim to treat. And there is no good evidence that there is such a thing as an anti inflammatory diet.
There are significant differences in the way bodies metabolize the different saturated fatty acids. Sometimes the metabolic pathways compete with one another, so ratios can matter as much as raw quantity.
If you just go by total saturated fat content, without looking at the specific chemical components, you can't tell the difference between coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and palm oil.
While anything you eat has the potential to be terrible for you at a certain level of consumption, a certain level of specificity is called for. Someone who has chosen coconut oil as their staple fat has made a conscious effort to eat more lauric acid and less palmitic acid or stearic acid. If it was just a matter of saturated fat versus unsaturated fat, and they wanted to eat more saturated, they could have chosen the much cheaper palm oil or pork lard.
Even if the person chooses to eat minimal saturated fat, there are still great differences in the available dietary fats. Is it rich or poor in omega-3 and omega-6? Have any double bonds flipped from cis-bonds to trans-bonds? Are the fatty acids free or still attached to a glycerol? Does the eater have any genetic conditions that make a particular metabolic pathway slower, limited by the presence of some other nutrient, or absent entirely?
In general, we still don't know a lot about the specifics of fat metabolism. As long as there is an excess of carbohydrate in the body, lipids are generally used as building blocks of the body--like amino acids from protein--rather than for energy. They come in many shapes and sizes, like LEGO blocks, except unlike those hard plastic blocks and bits, the body can cut and bend and reshape its lipids within certain metabolic constraints.
If any particular building block is in excess, the body usually just makes more of whatever the default structure is for that piece. Too much stearic acid might get hooked together with a glycerol and dumped into the oil drop in a white adipose cell. Too much palmitic acid might get rolled into LDL cholesterol. Too much lauric acid could get put into HDL cholesterol. We don't really know for sure what the body does when the ratios are off, or what the perfect balance of ratios is.
Saturated fat alone is not bad at all, it's actually very healthy. However combining it with carbs it's a bomb. If you don't believe me, try to find any study with negative effects of saturated fat where the diet doesn't also include >30% of calories as carbs.
Basically any diet beyond little studied, highly specialized diets that are often done short term by athletic types (eg keto, paleo). You just won't find good data with such a small, highly self selected population that includes an high amount of exercise.
Keto is often used as a sort of very effective diet to cut fat preferentially. For example people like body builders use it effectively after their bulking phase.
It has gained much wider adoption recently of you include things like Atkins, but true keto is still very much more often used by a very self selected group of fitness people and a limited time (although I could be wrong and don't know of any good serveys).
However keto is not a long term diet and I don't know if long term effects have rally been studied much. I know more people that do keto cycling than sustained keto anymore.
You can even find people who are into various forms "traditional foods" (not diet trends like paleo...though maybe that too?) go further than more cautious articles like this in affirming -benefits- of saturated fat. Catherine Shanahan for example argues in Deep Nutrition that saturated fat can be good.
The link clearly states multiple times that poly unsaturated fats are preferred to saturated fats when looking at various health factors. It just says that we dont know if it because saturated fats are bad for you or poly unsaturated fats are good food you.
Regardless, choosing to cook with coconut oil instead of olive or avocado oil clearly falls under that.
I have friends that now cook with coconut oil as one of their main oils replacing poly unsaturated oils. I think it is going to be like soy and in 20 years the nutrition community is going to do yet another 180 on it.
