Quite a bit of coverage all day yesterday to the news that certainly didn’t surprise me – saturated fat doesn’t cause heart attacks; in fact, low-fat foods may be much more harmful.
As ever the low-fat lobby put up a good fight pointing out that the British Heart Foundation still says go low fat. Well they would wouldn’t they? After bleating on about low-fat diets for like, forever, they can’t very well now turn round and say, whooops! We were wrong. But they were. And a leading cardiologist writing in the BMJ is saying so now, as well as an entire country – Sweden – as I reported on Monday. So why – WHY! – does the low-fat myth persist?
Big people can’t admit they’re wrong
The answer is very simple: big people just can’t admit when they’re wrong! Even when the evidence is presented to them they cling desperately onto beliefs that have sustained and kept them going for years. To say they were wrong all along is to deny their entire professional lives, to admit they’ve been giving the WRONG advice to heart patients for years.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra says the risk from saturated fat, ie butter, cheese, full-fat milk and full-fat yoghurts, has been overstated and wrongly demonised. Margarine, someone pointed out on the Jeremy Vine Show yesterday (not me!) is only one molecule from being plastic! Why would you want to eat plastic when you can have a natural product?
Bust the myth
It’s time, says Dr. Malhotra, to bust the myth about the role of saturated fat in heart disease. Any link with the demonised fat is not fully supported by scientific evidence. And going low fat can be more injurious to health because the food industry had compensated for lowering fat levels in food with more sugar. And it’s sugar that does the harm.
Too many carbs are bad for you but butter is fine says Dr. Malhotra. It was heartening that so many callers to the Jeremy Vine Show yesterday (first item discussed) said they’d been eating high fat foods for years and their cholesterol levels and hearts were fine. My cholesterol levels have gone down since I went high fat/high protein/low carb.
Evidence mounts
There is now mounting evidence that a high-fat diet isn’t bad for you; a high-carb one is. As I write this it’s mid-morning and I’ve yet to have any breakfast because I’m not hungry. I ate nothing amazingly filling last night nor did I have a huge meal late on. I had my evening meal at about 7pm and it was a good quality burger with mushrooms and broccoli followed by a handful of berries. It’s kept me going and my blood sugar feels fine.
A diet high in fat and protein stabilises the blood sugar and makes you much less likely to get Diabetes but also heart disease and strokes. But don’t take my word for it nor my personal experimentation with this diet. For what is just one person’s experience? Go to the BMJ website and read the article in full. Pretty sure the BMJ wouldn’t have published it if it hadn’t been peer reviewed and put through many strenuous tests.
Experts disagree
Yes experts disagree and to some extent you could just take the advice of whichever expert suits your own beliefs and fine. But there is now a strong movement away from low-fat diets and certainly away from high-carb ones. That some experts remain so fiercely wedded to low fat is because some people just can’t admit they’ve backed the wrong horse in this race.
Have a good Thursday.
