You recommend in the fertility and pregnancy unit that women focus on saturated fat and cholesterol. How would this recommendation change if the woman falls into the category we would typically recommend to eat a Mediterranean Paleo diet?

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I suppose it depends on maybe to some extent on the woman’s age, but if a woman has high LDL and even high LDL particle number, if you do like a Reynolds Risk Score calculation—we’ll talk more about this when we get to blood chemistry in the lipids section—if a woman is 25, 30, or 35, even if she has sky-high cholesterol, her 10-year risk of having a heart attack is going to be 1 percent, almost certainly, and that is as low as it can get. Age is a huge part of risk determining and stratifying risk of heart attack, so you have to consider what the most important factors are. When a woman is pregnant, the most important factor is nourishing her baby, so I personally wouldn’t be too worried with a younger woman and seeing her cholesterol and LDL-P go up a bit during pregnancy when she’s eating more saturated fat and dietary cholesterol because, as you know, it sounds like, there is no evidence that suggests that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol significantly contribute to the risk of heart disease overall. There are individual differences probably, but I wouldn’t be concerned about that during pregnancy.