Saturated Fat is not your enemy!
For more than five decades we’ve been brainwashed to believe that saturated fat causes heart disease. It’s such a deeply ingrained belief that few people even question it. It’s just part of our culture now. Fifty years ago Ancel Keys came up with a Hypothesis and 50 years later the Hypothesis is still just that a Hypothesis, with study after study funded by the pharmaceutical companies trying to prove him right you would of thought they would of managed by now, in the mean time they’ve been making hundreds of Billions a year selling cholesterol lowering drugs and heart disease keeps rising!
Almost every day I read or hear about someone that believes they have a “healthy” diet because they don’t eat butter, cheese or red meat or any other foods high in saturated fat (never mind that red meat isn’t particularly high in saturated fat, but that’s a subject for another post). What are you eating instead I think? Processed Carbohydrates?
What most people don’t realize is that it took many years to convince people that eating traditional, animal fats is bad for you, while eating highly-processed, industrial vegetable oils like corn and soybean oil is good for you. Margarine is made from hydrogenated or refined plant oils, being told this is healthy simply defies common sense. But the relentless, widespread campaign to discredit saturated fat and promote industrial oils was eventually successful.
What if I told you that there’s no evidence to support the idea that saturated fat consumption causes heart disease? What if I told you that the 50+ years of cultural brainwashing we have all been subject to was based on small, poorly designed studies? And what if I told you that a review of large, well-designed studies published in reputable medical journals showed that there is no association between saturated fat and heart disease?
Well, that’s what I’m telling you. We’ve been duped. Lied to. And we’ve suffered greatly as a result. Not only have we suffered from being encouraged to eat packaged and processed foods made with cheap, tasteless vegetable oils and refined carbohydrates (low-fat cuisine), but these very foods we were told would protect us from heart disease actually promote it!
The recent review I’m talking about is a meta-analysis published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It pooled together data from 21 unique studies that included almost 350,000 people, about 11,000 of whom developed cardiovascular disease (CVD), tracked for an average of 14 years, and concluded that there is no relationship between the intake of saturated fat and the incidence of heart disease or stroke.
Eating saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.
if you’re not convinced then I strongly suggest you read ‘The Great Cholesterol Myth’ by Stephen T Sinatra. You can make up your own mind afterwards.
Being over weight can have a big influence on heart disease so if eating to much saturated fat is making you overweight then you could argue there is a link, however a far and I mean far bigger evil to being over weight is sugar! Cut out al processed carbohydrates and you will find keeping the weight down a lot easier. I suggest only eating un-processed foods in fact if it is un-processed natural organic food then you really don’t need to worry!
One day your over worked Doctor who barely has time to read the weekly medical journal and has only had the very basic nutrition training will one day tell you that saturated fat is fine,
Unfortunately it’s not going to happen overnight. Paradigm shifts don’t work that way. But I’ve seen some positive signs, and I do believe the tide is turning. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 50 years.
