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Below is a copy of my article published in the July issue of Pampering Times.
Phil Nuttridge continues his series of articles looking at the modern take on diet and nutrition. He explodes many of the dietary myths that defined the latter decades of the twentieth century and left their legacy of chronic illnesses in the first decades of this century. In this month’s article he looks at the ‘Fat is bad for you’ myth. More information can be found on Phil’s website cuttingcarbs.co.uk or by following him on Instagram: CuttingCarbsUK
I have often wondered if the Sprat household was a harmonious one:
Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so between them both, you see
They’d lick the platter clean
Putting this in a modern context, Jack was clearly following the ideals of a low-fat diet but what of his wife? Was she an early adopter of the high-fat, low carb movement by insisting that there was ‘no lean’ on her plate? The rhyme does imply that they lived in some sort of harmony, a sort of ‘yin and yang’ approach to eating. Sadly such harmony does not exist between the two distinct camps in modern nutrition: We have the ‘fat is bad’ movement in one corner, firmly believing in the evil of dietary saturated fats and cholesterol. In the other corner we have the ‘Carbs are bad’ disciples; their mission is to convince us that sugar and starches have been the public enemy and that eating fat is good for us. But who is right?
As you will discover in this series of articles, I am very much in the latter camp. I firmly believe that many of the chronic non-communicable epidemic diseases of the twenty-first century are linked to our love affair with sugars and starches and our fear of dietary fat. But I will also show that I am not particularly an advocate of boundless fat consumption either – there are limits and ‘rules’ we should apply here too. I will discuss for example, how modern genetics has shown that those of you with one particular variant of one specific gene should limit saturated fat consumption. I will also discuss how there are good fats and bad fats, but will surprise you as to where I draw the line between the two.
But where did this fear of fat come from? Consumption of natural fats – olive oil, coconut oil, animal fats and blubber has been a key part of traditional diets around the world for much of Man’s history. In our hunter-gatherer past, fattier parts of an animal were much more highly prized than the leaner, fat-stripped skeletal muscle which is pretty much all supermarkets offer us today. Where we have records or where we are still able to observe populations eating high natural fat diets, we see that there was or is little incidence of modern epidemic diseases such as obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. When these same populations have been introduced (forcibly or by choice) to the foods of industrialised society – principally refined grains, cereals and sugars and synthetic fats – then those epidemic diseases appear, often in startlingly short timescales. And yet we still blame the consumption of natural fats.
If like me you were a baby of the Sixties, for pretty much all of your adult life you have been told eating fat is bad: “Fat makes you fat”, “fat clogs your arteries”, “fat gives you heart attacks”. Conversely we are also told carbs are good, carbs are healthy, eating carbs will make you slim. Eat lots of grains and cereals and you will be okay. Low fat eating is the healthy way forward, or so we are told.
And the statistics show we have indeed done what we were told. We do eat less fat than 50 years ago, we do eat more low-fat versions of food, we do eat more carbs. So why are we now so fat and unhealthy? I and many others now believe this is due to our obsessive fear of dietary fat.
Fat is a vital component of your diet. There are in fact ‘essential’ fats, fats (actually fatty acids) that your body must eat. Stop eating all fats and you will die. You will become unhealthy if you restrict your fats. Fats are a vital energy source, they insulate us, they protect our vital organs. Fat is an important medium for storing essential minerals and vitamins. Cholesterol, which is a particular form of fat, is actually a very key substance in your body. It acts as an anti-inflammatory for the brain and immune system, it is the precursor for Vitamin D which your body synthesises when sunlight bathes our skin. It is similarly used to make many of the body’s hormones. Cholesterol is an essential component of all cell membranes and a particularly important building block for the nerve cells in our brain. Cholesterol is also part of the ‘first response’ process when there is inflammatory damage to our blood vessel walls. Fats are essential for us to survive and thrive.
There are no essential carbohydrates. You mainly use carbohydrates as fuel and you can quite easily train your body to use fat instead. And although your body does need some (not much) carbohydrate even when fat adapted, it can synthesise all the carbohydrate it does need from fats and proteins. Stop eating carbs and you will not die. As my later articles will show, you would actually thrive on reduced carbs.
So how come we have been told to restrict our consumption of fat?
A bit of history helps explain this. By the 1950s there were serious concerns about the rising epidemic of heart disease. In 1955 President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack and suddenly heart disease was headline news. It became the primary health concern in the Western world. No-one knew for sure what caused heart disease – there were ideas and theories but nothing was definitive. Of the many hypotheses of the time, one was that heart disease was caused by dietary saturated fats and in particular cholesterol. One of the key proponents of this hypothesis was a pathologist called Ancel Keys. He had unshakable faith in his idea and coupled with his dogged and bullying personality he managed to get his hypothesis incorporated into the thinking of the American Heart Association (A.H.A.). In the wake of the President’s heart attack, the A.H.A. was under significant pressure to be seen to be doing something to combat the rising level of heart disease. Fuelled by Keys’ unwavering faith in his own hypothesis, the A.H.A. issued dietary advice for all Americans and this advice was predicated on the idea that cutting consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol would reduce your risk of heart disease. That was it, courtesy of the A.H.A. and Ancel Keys, Fatphobia was born and from it grew the monster that is the current dietary advice for the developed world.
The demonisation of fat took hold quickly and flourished. The low-fat industry was created and under its coat-tails, in crept the high sugar, high grain and cereal diets. Food producers rubbed their hands as the low-fat, high sugar and highly processed grain foods are hugely profitable. Manufacturers of synthetic fats were happy too as their chemically engineered oils and margarines were advocated as the ‘healthy option’ by the A.H.A.
But what was the scientific evidence for fatphobia? The evidence centred on just one dietary study, conducted by Keys of course, where he looked at the dietary habits of seven countries and correlated the levels of fat consumption in those populations with their heart disease outcomes. He measured the fat and cholesterol consumption of 13,000 men in those seven countries and then waited to see who died of a heart attack.
The problem is that we now know he cherry-picked his data. Through a pilot study conducted earlier, he knew which countries had both low rates of fat consumption and and low rates of heart disease and included those countries in his study. He also knew, but chose to ignore, the countries that had high rates of fat consumption and yet also had low rates of heart disease. He had pilot study data from 22 countries but chose to use data from only seven, discounting the other 15 as they did not fit his hypothesis. With his cherry-picked data, he was able to show that those countries that ate lower amounts of fat had lower levels of heart disease and those that ate more fat, had more heart disease. But even with his skewed data, all he showed was correlation – he could not show that high fat diets causedheart disease. Yet he was determined to use the study as evidence for causation. He ignored the fact that those countries with low levels of heart disease also had low levels of sugar consumption. He also ignored that his data showed a much stronger correlation between heart disease and sugar consumption than between heart disease and fat consumption.
Keys aggressively defended his study and although there were significant academic voices questioning his methods and his interpretation of the results at the time, he prevailed. In the following decades, literally hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on clinical trials trying to support the outcome of that original seven countries study. The most ambitious and most costly single study trying to support the ‘fat is bad’ hypothesis is the (rather snappily titled) Women’s Health Initiative Randomised Controlled Dietary Modification Trial (WHIRCDMT) which alone cost $700 million, took eight years to complete and involved over 48,000 test subjects. That trial along with all of the other trials spectacularly failed to show that low fat diets offered any improvement in heart disease outcomes. Every single one. In fact, if you look closely at the data from the WHIRCDMT, you see that it actually shows worsened health outcomes, including weight gain, for those on the low fat dietary regime. The data is also very troubling reading for the manufacturers of statins, but I will save that for a later article.
So there we have it: ’Fat is bad’ is a flawed hypothesis and always has been. And yet we have built a megalith that is the modern paradigm of dietary advice based entirely on that flawed hypothesis.
Although the incidence of death from heart attack is less than it was fifty years ago (mainly due to reduced levels of smoking and earlier diagnoses), incidence of all cardiovascular disease markers is now at the highest level ever. Obesity is at the highest levels ever. Vitamin D deficiency is pandemic creating its own chronic health issues. Degenerative neurological disorders – dementia and Alzheimers included – are also an increasing burden on our health services. All are certainly correlated with the low fat dietary advice; contributory causation is highly likely.
As has been suggested by leading voices in modern nutrition, the low fat dietary advice has been a mass experiment carried out on the population of the developed world and it has failed. For more information on the history of fatphobia, I would highly recommend ‘The Big Fat Surprise’ by Nina Teicholz.
So perhaps Mrs Sprat was on to a good thing after all. By ‘eating no lean’ she was ensuring good amounts of healthy fats in her diet promoting good health. Her poor husband however, was setting-up chronic illness and in all likelihood premature death, by cutting the fat. No wonder she has a wry smile in all the books of Nursery Rhymes.
In my next article I want to explain how this has been a doubly-whammy. Not only is cutting fat from your plate bad for your health, but putting carbs – sugars, grains and cereals – in its stead, is in all likelihood creating yet more problems. In particular, I shall be looking at how the epidemic of Type II diabetes, inflammatory diseases and obesity can be laid at the door of excess carbs.
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