I've read that editorial being quoted before by WP Castelli. Do you know where I can find the full article online? I went to the source, the Internal Medicine articles of JAMA and found the article "Concerning the Possibility of a nut," but they only have the title and you cannot view the abstract/article. Do you know where I can find a copy online? Thanks!

Also, to comment on your statement at the end of your post regarding eating a great deal of saturated fat and lowering cholesterol. I'm not sure if it's saturated fat that needs to be ingested to lower cholesterol. It could just be fat in general, or that when more fat is eaten, less carbohydrate is ingested if we want to take in the same number of calories. We know that the USDA basically told America that fat is "bad," but had little evidence to support it. If the Framingham subjects ingested the same number of calories from FAT, but less were coming from saturated fat, I don't think we would see a rise in total cholesterol. The only way I could see that happening would be due to levels of HDL rising as many studies have conlcluded that unsaturated fat (particularly mono-unsaturated fat, like those found in Olive Oil and nuts) raised HDL and lowered incidence of CHD. And the studies also show that more is better, meaning the people who ingest a great deal of unsaturated fat see HDL rising further and CHD less prevelant. And common sense tells us that if these people are getting a large amount of calories from fat, then they must be eating a lower percentage of carbohydrates (and to a lesser extent, protein) in the diet.

A major point of this is the evidence, like you said, leads to the conclusion that eating more fat (albeit for most studies, unsaturated) lowers our incidence for coronary heart disease, yet most prescribe the 12/30/58 PROTEIN/FAT?CARBOHYDRATE ratio from the reports by the USDA.