Do people with HIV eat too much saturated fat?
Research points to several factors that may upset normal lipids in people with HIV infection, including an array of antiretrovirals and HIV itself. But what HIV-infected people eat on their way to out-of-line lipid readings has earned less attention, at least until a study of 356 people with HIV and 162 healthy controls by Hester Keogh and coworkers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health [1]. Although the non-HIV group downed more saturated fat than the HIV group, people with HIV consumed significantly more calories as saturated fat than the non-HIV group. Slightly more people in the HIV group took lipid-lowering drugs (12.1% versus 9.9%), a nonsignificant difference (P = 0.18) (but see the next section for a bigger HIV/non-HIV comparison of antilipid therapy). As one would expect, people with HIV had significantly lower CD4 counts (average 444 versus 871 cells, P The HIV and non-HIV groups had similar proportions of men (55.3% HIV, 45.1% non-HIV) and w
