September 2006 LSAT Section 4 Question 9

Typically, people who have diets high in saturated fat have an increased risk of heart disease. Those who replace sat...

JackM on January 10, 2023

Why A?

The stimulus first discusses replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Then it discusses just adding saturated fat. I didn't choose A because it didn't talk about replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat, just adding it. Couldn't someone eat the same amount of saturated fat and just add more foods, which contain saturated fat in their diets? This wouldn't replace anything and there may be no decrease in heart issues. (i said heart issues because forgot if it said heart attack or heart disease lol)

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Emil-Kunkin on January 15, 2023

You hit the issue on the head, this is a really bad argument. The author tells us that people can reduce risk by replacing saturated with normal. This makes enough sense. However, the author then gives us a frankly stupid conclusion, that we should just eat more regular fat... without necessarily reducing our intake of saturated fat to match.

A fixes this problem, by telling us that if we add regular fat, we will reduce saturated fat, fixing the major flaw.

DevinFuller on June 17 at 07:48PM

Would you mind breaking this down Emil? Or whoever from LSATMax that is available? Thank you!

Emil-Kunkin on June 18 at 01:56AM

Hi @devinfuller,

Let's start with just trying to approach the passage. The first sentence sets out a fact: people who eat a lot of saturated fat tend to be more at risk for heart disease. This tells me two possible things: that there is a correlation, and that we might have a causal relationship, although that is far from guaranteed (it also tells me to eat healthier but oh well).

The second sentence tells us that when people replace the saturated fat with unsaturated fat, their risk goes down. This strongly suggests that unsaturated fats are less bad for you than saturated fats, and all else being equal, it is probably a good thing to replace saturated fat with unsaturated fat.

Then we have our conclusion: that people who eat saturated fats should eat more unsaturated fat to reduce their risk. This is similar to what was described in the second sentence but there is one key difference. In the premise, we are told that people replace one with the other. In the conclusion we are told that people should increase unsaturated, but not that they should offset the increase in saturated with a decrease in unsaturated.

This is a pretty big flaw. Perhaps, according to the conclusions logic, one could eat the same amount of sat fats and triple the amount of unsaturated fats, and one's risk would go down. This is not supported by the premises.

For this question we are looking to find an answer choice that strengthens the argument, and A fixes this flaw. It tells us that by adding more unsaturated fats, we will indeed reduce our sat fat consumption.

DevinFuller on July 2 at 06:42PM

Thank you! That makes a lot of sense.