The control I want is plain heavy cream. Also at least a week for people to adapt to eating this meal, the acute response to a food depends to large degree on habitual diet.

It's mentioned that these short term effects on red blood cells are mirrored in rodents on high fat diets long term. Well, the sort of fatty, sugary carby diet they're talking about is just the thing to elevate fasting triglycerides, maybe it's not surprising if that does the same thing to red blood cells as a large fat meal for somebody not accustomed to it. Jeff Volek has done some work looking at the blood triglyceride response to a similar high fat meal in people on high carb, low fat or low carb, high fat diets. In the low carb, high fat dieters, fat tolerance was much higher, blood triglycerides much lower at all time points.