Ricardo Carvalho, whose great database work I highlighted yesterday, just emailed me another graph. The latest saturated fat data he could find was from 1998, but see if you can find any correlation. It's all over the map. If you had to draw a trend, however, how would it look? I'd probably start it from the left at the 120 and finish off to the right at about 80, i.e., more saturated fat associated with less CHD mortality. Update 3/30/2009: Physicist Robert McLeod took the tabular data I provided and did a fit in MATLAB. The punchline is that there's only a 1% chance of the slope being positive (more saturated fat correlated with more CHD deaths) and a 99% chance the slope is negative (more saturated fat correlated with fewer CHD deaths). Interesting how, once again, the French thumb their noses at the rest of the world. Red wine? Gimmeabreak. I lived there, and most people have no idea how much animal fat most of them eat. From their fat-heavy sauses to their fatty charcuterie and pâté, to their sweet butter and many fine cheeses. I've remarked before about the difference between how Americans eat cheese and how the...