Professor Sarah Berry

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555 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Professor Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · Recap: Fat: The full story | Sarah Berry · 27 Jan 2026 podcast

So we know that the kind of saturated fatty acids that are in butter, in palm oil, in animal fats, for example, can increase our cholesterol.

Now, cholesterol is made up of good and bad cholesterol.

And what we particularly don't want is an increase in good cholesterol alongside an increase in

in bad cholesterol.

And saturated fatty acids increase our bad cholesterol.

Some of them do also increase our good cholesterol.

So again, it's a little bit more complicated, I'm sorry to say, depending on the type of saturated fatty acid.

But what we do now know, which I don't think we were so aware of 30, 40 years ago, is that carbohydrates can have a really big impact also on our cholesterol levels and also on our circulating triglyceride levels, which we also know is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

So if you consume a diet high in refined carbohydrates, and by refined carbohydrates, I mean bread, I mean pasta, I mean rice, I mean also a lot of the processed carbohydrates like snack bars, crisps that you might consume.

What this does is at the level of our liver, it promotes the production of lipids.

So this is another word for the kind of fats that are produced in our body.

And that increases our cholesterol levels and increases our levels of circulating triglycerides.

But to loop back to what you mentioned about cheese, I think that's a really good example of how we need to move beyond this simplistic approach of thinking about the types of fat.

So I just said that actually the type of saturated fat you have in butter is bad for us.

Now, dairy cheese, so fermented dairy such as cheese and yogurt, has a really similar fatty acid composition to butter.

But actually, it doesn't have the same unfavorable effects on our health as butter does.

And the reason is, is because of this matrix, the kind of special structure in which dairy

The fatty acids sit within the dairy products that are fermented within the cheese and the yogurt.

So you could feed people a moderate cheese diet and moderate butter diet.

The cheese wouldn't have any unfavorable effects, yet actually the butter would have an unfavorable effect despite having a similar fat composition.

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