Very quick question. In your “where should my priorities be for health” article, you guys say that total saturated fat intake should be at <10% a day, which is understandable. However, you go on to say that one exception are the saturated fats from dairy. Digging through some old forum posts, I saw that Jordan had recommended that total saturated fat intake still be <10% whether it come from dairy or other sources, if I understood correctly. So, how bad would it be if a ton of my daily calories (well above 10%) came from dairy? I’m asking this because I’ve always consumed a ton of dairy throughout my life (not to the extent of GOMAD I should say, though). Probably quite a trivial question, but better safe than sorry I guess. Thanks.
To be clear, the <10% guideline is for dietary saturated fat calories, not calories in general. It applies most strongly to animal meat-based SFA and butter, where benefits can be obtained by replacing these food sources with alternatives.
Our friends at sigma wrote a solid summary on the topic, which illustrates the differential effects from different dairy food sources (eg butter vs milk vs cheese vs yogurt), with butter tending to have the most deleterious effects overall.
If you are in good health otherwise and obtain more than 10% of calories from yogurt SFA, for example, I wouldn’t sweat it. In contrast, if 20% of your calories came from SFA content of butter, for example, we could make a case for alternatives.