A big difference betwen saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acid is that the former has a tendency to raise cholesterol, and the latter tends to lower it. Thus, people often tell you to choose oil that lowers cholesterol.
If you refer to the figure 15, you’ll notice that 66% of butter is saturated fatty acid and only 3% is polyunsaturated. On the other hand, the ratio of saturated fatty acid to polyunsaturated fatty acid in margarine is 26% to 38%. Even though butter and margarine are very similar, margarin contains much more polyunsaturated fatty acid.
Among our everyday-use plant oils, for example, safflower oil has about 10% saturated fatty acid and about 77% polyunsaturated. The reason why oil that contains safflower oil is rather expensive is that it contains much more polyunsaturated fatty acid. Corn oil and soybean oil also have it in large quantity. It can be said that the plant oils that we use for cooking normally have a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acid and lower cholesterol.
Meat is a little more complicated. the balance of fatty acids in meat differs between beef, pork and chicken: Beef contains 59% saturated fatty acid and 1% Polyunsaturated fatty acid, pork contains 45% saturated and 9% polyunsaturated, and?chicken contains 36% saturated and 20% polyunsaturated. Chicken has the most polyunsaturated fatty acid?of the three. It shows that the cheaper, the better the meat is for health. Pork comes next, and beef has more saturated fatty acid than the other two.
Japanese people have been eating chicken, which is cheaper and contains relatively a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acid, so we’ve been able to keep the cholesterol low. However, as the price of beef became inexpensive lately and the demand for it is increasing, some problems might appear from from now on. If you choose chicken or pork, you can have more polyunsaturated fatty acid, and it is safer about cholesterol.
By the way, the topical fish oil has saturated fatty acid and polyunsaturated fatty acid about equally. That means, fish works much stronger to lower cholesterol than meat.
