Low fat food products are a con

05 August 2014

The clearest version yet of the story behind the distressingly confused and troubled world of dietary advice has just been presented by Nina Teicholz in her New York Time bestseller The Big Fat Surprise, which has attracted favourable reviews.

In the book Ms Teicholz reveals that the war on dietary saturated fat was declared by the American Heart Association in 1956, based on flawed science, unwittingly boosted by the national anxiety that followed a serious heart attack experienced in 1955 by President Eisenhower. Media attention to the President’s health opened the way for a particular theory about the widespread incidence of heart failure to be elevated to national acceptance. Put simply — and to borrow a phrase from more recent history — saturated fat was dubbed erroneously to be a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ of healthy hearts.

The medical researcher who developed the saturated fat theory was Ancel Keys, who had cherry-picked data from six countries showing a correlation between fat consumption and heart disease, while ignoring data from many other countries where there was no such correlation.

Serum cholesterol was identified as a key indicator of cardio-vascular risk. It was found that saturated fat (most common in animal fats) raised cholesterol, while unsaturated fat (found mostly in oil seeds like olive and soy) did not. Keys achieved celebrity status in the media through aggressive promotion of his theory, so that his demonisation of saturated fat was swiftly embraced in a national policy urging an incisive reduction of fat, particularly saturated fat, in the American diet.

Decades later, the incidence of heart disease has not diminished, while obesity and Type-2 diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. Credible science journals have lately been publishing robust reports that saturated fat is not implicated in heart disease.

At the same time, research has shown that cholesterol is a complex entity coming in both good and bad forms. Two lipoproteins of low and high density respectively (LDL and HDL) ‘manage’ cholesterol in the blood stream. They have opposing effects on its availability to do harm by over-patching inflamed arterial walls to the point of blockage, thereby presenting a neutral risk of harm when present is balanced proportions.

There are many other factors which pre-dispose the body for the development of cardiovascular disease — especially smoking, excess alcohol, lifestyle stress, and excess dietary sugar promoting inflammation, as well-asType 2 diabetes and obesity. Saturated fat in the diet is now recognised as not even present

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Low fat food products are a con

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