“That signs of liver damage were linked to carbohydrates was another key finding, he said.

“It was not the fat in the hamburgers, it was rather the sugar in the coke,” he said.

But the most startling result implies that an intensive fast food diet might have some health benefits too, apparently from fat.

“We found that healthy HDL cholesterol actually increased over the four-week period – this was very counter-intuitive,” Nystrom said.

HDL, sometimes called “good cholesterol,” seems to clean the walls of blood vessels, removing excess “bad cholesterol” that can cause coronary artery disease and transporting it to the liver for processing.

Nystrom has yet to publish the cholesterol findings, but said they were consistent with the so-called “French Paradox.”

For nearly two decades, scientists have wrestled to explain how the French can consume a diet rich in fats – from abundant butter, cream, cheese and meat – yet have generally low levels of heart disease and hypertension.

“The study showed that the increase in saturated fat correlated with the increase in healthy cholesterol,” he said.”

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