Does Saturated Fat Cause Heart Disease?

A large new study has concluded that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. Here's a quote from one of the many articles about the study:

"Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

For decades, health officials have urged the public to avoid saturated fat as much as possible, saying it should be replaced with the unsaturated fats in foods like nuts, fish, seeds and vegetable oils.

But the new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil."

Another review, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, contains data from twenty-one studies that included 350,000 people and tracked for an average of fourteen years. 

The conclusion? 

There is no relationship between the intake of saturated fat and the incidence of heart disease or stroke.

In other words, eating saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease.