Cardiometabolic impacts of saturated fatty acids: are they all comparable?

Abstract

In last decades, a phenomenon named nutrition transition has been observed in many countries around the world. It has been characterised by increased consumption of fat-rich diets, predisposing to cardiometabolic diseases and high prevalence of the obesity. In the dietary recommendations cited to prevent metabolic diseases, there is a consensus to decrease intake of saturated fatty acids (SFA) to less than 10% of total energy intake, as recommended by the Food Safety Authorities. However, fatty acids of different chain lengths may exhibit different cardiometabolic effects. Thus, our major aim was to review the cardiometabolic effects of different classes of SFA according to carbon chain length, i.e. short-, medium- and long-chains. The review emphasises that not all SFA may have harmful cardiometabolic effects since short- and medium-chain SFA can provide beneficial health effects and participate to the prevention of metabolic disorders.

Keywords:

• Saturated fatty acids
• obesity
• nutrition transition
• cardiometabolic
• dyslipidemia

Acknowledgments

The authors who are graduate students (AMNLG Bloise, AC Simões-Alves, and DS Alves) thank fellowship grants from Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Scholarship – CAPES) and Fundação de Amparo a Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco-PE-Brazil (Scholarship – FACEPE). In addition, we thank CAPES/COFECUB Program for the postdoctoral project conducted by Professor JH Costa-Silva at l’Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação de Amparo a Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco-PE-Brazil [PRONEM 0797-4.05/14], the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - Brazil [CNPq 311386/2019-9] and CAPES/COFECUB Program (number: 797-14 and 923-20).