Saturated fat doesn’t make you fat (or cause heart disease)!

When are government and health authorities going to admit that the healthy eating advice and product endorsements they’ve been making regarding dietary fat, is just plain wrong? Saturated fat doesn’t make you fat or increases your cholesterol.

There’s simply is NO evidence to support the hypothesis that saturated fat causes you to become fat, or that it causes heart disease. The plain fact is that we are made of saturated fat – it forms the membrane of each and every cell in our body, is essential to the absorption of fat soluble vitamins and many minerals and is a key component of many hormones. We need saturated fat to be healthy.

Joining other independent-minded nutritionists and doctors, cardiologist Aseem Malhotra is another cardiologist to recently challenged the ‘fat’ orthodoxy, discrediting the accepted notion that saturated fats found in butter cause heart disease. He states that “three-quarters of patients admitted to the hospital with acute myocardial infarction (a heart attack) do not have high total cholesterol.” For more about Malhotra’s research, you can read the LA Times Science article “Time to end the war against saturated fat.”

So how has this dangerously incorrect advice has been able to wreak devastation to the health of those that heed it for so many years – unchallenged and unchecked. The Guardians article “Butter is bad – a myth we’ve been fed by the ‘healthy eating’ industry” explains it perfectly…

“Viewed cynically, however, it would be naive not to notice how the anti-sat-fat message has been used effectively by food manufacturers and processors to woo us away from whole, natural foods, such as butter, which is only minimally processed, on to their products, which are entirely the opposite, such as margarine.

For decades now, processed food companies have been using low-fat labels to give a halo of health to their industrially manufactured, nutritionally compromised, food constructions; everything from low-calorie yoghurt and pizza, to breakfast cereals and ready meals. The motto has been, if you want to sell crap, make sure it’s low-fat crap because few people will look beyond the low-fat label to scrutinise the product’s composition.

The fatwa on sat fat has been a fabulous boon for the sugar and cereals industries. It acts as a red herring, drawing our attention away from the much likelier cause of obesity: an overabundance of sugar and refined carbohydrates, which disrupt blood sugar and insulin levels, encouraging fat production and storage in the body. It has been bad news for livestock farmers, who produce dairy and meat, but they don’t have the lobbying might of the carb and sugar corporations.

But it’s hard to admit that we got it wrong. Reacting to Malhotra’s remarks, health charities have defended their low-fat advice in the usual kneejerk manner, despite it becoming increasingly obvious that it’s time for a paradigm shift.

Consider the fate of eggs, one of nature’s most complete foods. In the 1960s, the typical Briton ate five a week, then because they contained cholesterol, the nutritional establishment told us to eat no more than two. We dutifully acted on this guidance, and egg consumption slumped as we took in droves to eating nutritionally empty breakfast cereals. Three decades later, forced by unarguable evidence that eating cholesterol in eggs had no impact whatsoever on blood cholesterol levels, egg restriction advice was quietly ditched, and remodelled to say that eggs were part of a balanced diet.

Did we get an apology on eggs? Did we hell. So don’t hold your breath waiting for a climb-down on saturated fat. The healthy eating establishment will choke on its low-fat cornflakes before it coughs that up.”

Check out the full article here.

Concerned about this? Do your bit to make a change to current guidelines…
Want to make a difference concerning the misinformation regarding fats and cholesterol? Change.org are petitioning the Australian Heart Foundation to stop giving advice and promoting food that causes heart disease like low-fat and high-carbohydrate foods. To sign the petition, click here.

You might also like the ABC ‘Catalyst’ investigation video, here.  Seems I’m not the only one questioning the ‘low fat’ dietary dogma!

Please don’t fall for “low fat” anything – run from this health claim, run a mile back to your local whole food or farmers market! Have these recent ‘fat’ posts changed the way you view fat?  Love to receive your comments or questions.

Family Ad

Share the goodness!