New findings may explain the advantages of polyunsaturated fat
The so-called "muffin study" received a lot of attention when it was published in 2014. In this study, the participants had eaten three muffins a day, on average, for a period of seven weeks. Half of the muffins had been baked using saturated fat (palm oil) and the other half using polyunsaturated fat (sunflower oil). The carbohydrate and protein content was the same in each muffin, the only difference between them was the type of fat. In a collaboration with the person in charge of the major muffin study, associate professor Ulf Risérus at Uppsala University in Sweden, professor Charlotte Ling at Lund University, Sweden, has now studied the epigenetic changes in the study participants' fat tissue, through biopsies taken before and after the project. The results show that the epigenetic pattern in more than 3,000 genes (out of approximately 25,000 that exists in a human being) had changed differentially, depending on whether the participants had eaten saturated fat o...