This is probably going to be an even harder sell than MSG, but I swear I'm not just trying to be contrary. It's true that all the major sources of public health and nutrition advice, including the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayo Clinic, CDC, and American Heart Association continue to refer to saturated fats as "bad fats" and suggest that people avoid them as much as possible, limit them to <7-8% of their total caloric intake, and replace them with "good," i.e. unsaturated fats, whenever possible. It's also true that there are a few studies that suggest that increased saturated fat consumption is correlated (albeit weakly) with cardiovascular disease (CVD).

However, many other studies have found no increase in CVD associated with saturated fat consumption. And several recent review articles have concluded that the evidence for a connection between saturated fat consumption and CVD is inconsistent, insufficient or nonexistent.

There are basically three things that have convinced me that saturated fat isn't independently responsible for heart disease or death:

1) groups of people who eat vastly more saturated fat than most Americans frequently have lower rates of CVD—or no apparent CVD at all

2) the study that first inspired many people to think saturated fat was a bad thing had a lot of obvious flaws and has been thoroughly discredited

3) there's no good evidence that the proposed mechanism actually works—briefly: saturated fat supposedly causes heart disease by raising serum cholesterol levels because cholesterol is what clogs arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes, but serum cholesterol turns out to be a really poor predictor of CVD 

1) The French (and Polynesian and Melanesian and Masai and Fulani and Sri Lankan) Paradox 

The most confounding phenomenon for the theory that saturated fat consumption causes heart disease (sometimes called the lipid hypothesis or lipid-heart hypothesis or diet-heart hypothesis) is the virtual non-existence of CVD in multiple populations that eat way more saturated fat than most Americans. This has primarily been documented in the Pacific islands where coconuts, which are very high in saturated fat, are a staple food. For example, before the 1970s, the inhabitants of the island Tokelau got an estimated 55% of their calories from saturated fat, but heart disease was virtually unknown (according to Gary Taubes and Stephen Guyenet; notably, since their diet has shifted to include less saturated fat but more sugars and refined carbohydrates, many health indicators have worsened). Read more