Young adults who gained a short-term modest amount of weight but ate muffins cooked with polyunsaturated oils had less bad cholesterol than those who ate muffins made with saturated oil.
The findings suggest polyunsaturated oil is a much healthier option when it comes to fats, the American Heart Association reported.
To make their findings researchers conducted a seven-week study including 39 adults who were an average age of 27. The participants added three muffins per day to their diet, which were made with either unsaturated sunflower or saturated palm oil. The study aimed to have the participants gain about 3 percent of their body weight.
Both groups gained weight, but those who ate the unsaturated fat muffins tended to have lower low-density lipoproteins (LDL-bad cholesterol) level, a lower ratio between total cholesterol and high-density lipoproteins (HDL-good cholesterol), and other indicators of general cardiovascular health. The participants' LDL levels differed by 9 percent and their total cholesterol and high-density lipoproteins (HDL-good cholesterol) differed by 18 percent.
"Even in early adulthood, it is important to avoid high-calorie foods and weight gain, but also it is important to consume sufficient amounts of polyunsaturated fats from non-hydrogenated vegetable oils," said Dr. Ulf Risérus, principal investigator and associate professor of Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. "The lowering of the cholesterol/HDL cholesterol ratio by polyunsaturated fat is of special interest because recent large studies have shown this ratio seems to predict heart disease risk even better than LDL levels alone."
The good news is researchers believed the damage imposed by high-saturated fat diets can be reversed. The researchers hope to further back up this belief in future studies.
"Studies using these oils in weight-stable participants have demonstrated that the adverse effects on LDL seems to disappear shortly after they stop consuming foods with saturated fats, and this may also be the case here," Risérussaid said. "Such data would be important to encourage people who gained weight to lose their weight and lower their metabolic risk."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Heart Association.
