A former colleague at Men's Health emailed me yesterday to give me a heads-up on this story, which appears in the magazine's November issue. The story is a reassessment of the dangers of saturated fat in our diets, as well as an endorsement of its substantial but rarely mentioned benefits.

The former coworker added: "Did you ever imagine a day when this would run in MH?"

Frankly, no. I remember too well the battles over how we should approach the paradigm shift in nutrition science and practice. MH, like every health and fitness magazine, was stuck on the low-fat, low-protein, high-carb treadmill. If someone did a search of the Rodale database for the phrase "artery-clogging saturated fat," I'd expect it to come up thousands of times.

Beyond cardiovascular effects, we regarded dietary fat as something that automatically produced love handles and double chins. I can remember editing a book and having to correct a researcher who used the words "fatty" and "fattening" interchangeably. I couldn't convince her that a human body could use fat for energy.

The MH story is a terrific roundup of what we know about saturated fat, and what we think we know that's been discredited. I recommend reading the entire thing. But because this is a blog, and the Blogger's Code requires that I use someone else's copyrighted material in every post, I'll highlight my favorite section:

As it happens, I have records of fasted blood work taken in July 2000, right before I switched from a low-fat diet to the balanced-macronutrient diet we used in Testosterone Advantage Plan. I also had fasted blood work in December 2005, when I applied for a new life-insurance policy.

In those 5+ years of eating a higher-fat, lower-carb diet, my total cholesterol went up from 161 to 198. But because my HDL went up from 49 to 62, I improved my ratio of HDL to LDL by a fraction. My triglycerides went down from 83 to 71, and the amount of glucose in my blood stayed exactly the same, at 94.

Everything else on the second test -- from "albumin" to "uric acid" -- was right in the middle of the "expected value" range. (My previous blood work didn't measure those things, so I can't compare.)

I know my results present a sample size of one, and aren't meaningful to anyone but me. And I don't really eat all that much saturated fat -- more than I did in 2000, certainly, but I'm not exactly snacking on sticks of butter. Still, they are a straight apples-to-apples comparison of my blood fats on two different types of nutrition plans, the second of which has more fat and protein and less carbohydrate.

So all I can say for sure is that the switch works for me. You? Comments are open, and operators are standing by.

Thursday blog meat

• This report caught me by surprise. I'm not sure what to think of it.
• Andrew Heffernan ruminates on the bench press -- specifically, whether or not to share his personal best in the lift. I had the same dilemma in New Rules of Lifting. Do I tell readers how much I've struggled to increase my strength on the powerlifts, and risk diminishing myself as a source of useful and trustworthy information? Or do I give up the digits, and hope readers will empathize with the plight of a guy who worked long and hard to get stronger, even if I never actually got "strong" by fitness-pro standards? Like Andrew, I generally default to full disclosure, although Andrew's full disclosure is a lot more nuanced than mine. Click the link to see what I mean.