For decades, we were told that eating fat
would lead us to early grave. Horror stories of clogged arteries and coronaries
were the norm, while foods such as pasta were seen as healthy.
This is true. But where did people get this story
that eating fat was dangerous and eating refined grains, like pasta, was the
healthy alternative for us?
But research is increasingly disproving this theory--and
sugar is now public enemy number one.
Where
has he been? Hel-lo.
In
fact, fat is good for us and should be our medicine, claims cardiologist Dr
Aseem Malhotra, who is based in Surrey.
He
says a mounting slew of evidence suggests that far from contributing to heart
problems, having full fat dairy in your diet may actually protect you from
heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
There are other, better fats besides "full fat dairy." Coconut oil and coconut butter are some of the best fats; they have the highest content of saturated fats--you know--those fats that help you repair and feel better.
Here,
writing for Men's Health, he explains his controversial
view...
This
morning, as I do most days, I breakfasted on a three egg omelette cooked in
coconut oil, with a whole milk coffee.I
enjoyed a wedge of full fat cheese with my lunch, poured a liberal dose of
olive oil on my evening salad and snacked on nuts throughout the day.
In
short, I ingested a fair amount of fat and, as a cardiologist who has treated
thousands of people with heart disease, this may seem a particularly peculiar
way to behave.
Fat,
after all, furs up our arteries and piles on the pounds–-or at least that’s
what prevailing medical and dietary advice has had us believe.
That may be true but there seems to be a better way to dispel the myths than to joke about people's old fears, which are the result of a decades' long campaign against fat.
As a
result, most of us have spent years eschewing full fat foods for their ‘low
fat’ equivalents, in the hope it will leave us fitter and healthier.
Yet
I’m now convinced we have instead been doing untold damage: far from being the
best thing for health or weight loss, a low fat diet is the opposite.
In
fact, I would go so far as to say the change in dietary advice in 1977 to
restrict the amount of fat we were eating helped to fuel the obesity epidemic
unfolding today.
Okay. I agree. Where's the proof?
Far from
being the enemy, fat is good for us and should be our medicine, claims Dr
Malhotra.
It’s a
bold statement, but one I believe is upheld by an array of recent research.
Totally agree. Fat is more important than protein. Certain when it comes to bones, collagen, which can be found in Vitamin C-rich foods like fruits and vegetables, is more important than calcium in rebuilding structure and function.
WHY I
ENCOURAGE MY PATIENTS TO EAT FAT
These
days I make a point of telling my patients – many of whom are coping with
debilitating heart problems – to avoid anything bearing the label ‘low
fat’.
This is good but like I said after years of being brainwashed, how are these people going to feel confident about going ahead with foods that were previously treated as taboo?
Better
instead, I tell them, to embrace full fat dairy and other saturated fats within
the context of a healthy eating plan.
It’s
an instruction that is sometimes greeted with open-mouthed astonishment, along
with my request to steer clear of anything that promises to reduce cholesterol
– another of those edicts we are told can promote optimum heart and artery
health.
As we
will see, the reality is far more nuanced: in some cases lowering cholesterol
levels can actually increase cardiovascular death and mortality, while in
healthy people over 60 a higher cholesterol is associated with a lower risk of
mortality. Why, exactly, we will come to later.
First
though, let me make it clear that until very recently, I too assumed that
keeping fat to a minimum was the key to keeping healthy and trim.
That doesn't seem too helpful to tell his patients that he too was duped. "I thought that you were smarter than me, Doctor?" is what I would think. He may want to reconsider that statement, but simply provide a list of benefits to his patients with a list of evidentiary proof.
In
fact, to say my diet revolved around carbohydrates - sugared cereal, toast and
orange juice for breakfast, a panini for lunch and pasta for dinner was not an
uncommon daily menu.
Good
solid fuel, or so I thought, especially as I am a keen sportsman and
runner.
Still,
I had a wedge of fat round my stomach which no amount of football and running
seemed to shift.
That, though, wasn’t the reason I started to explore changing what I ate.
Yeah, I think it was Gary Taubes who made the argument that exercise simply makes people hungry. So exercise by itself without a change in one's diet is fairly useless in reducing that spare tire around your waist.
THE TOXIC TRUTH ABOUT SUGAR
That
process started in 2012, when I read a paper called ‘The Toxic Truth About Sugar," by Robert Lustig, [February 02, 2012,] in the science journal Nature.
In it,
Lustig, a Professor of Paediatrics who also works at the University of California’sCenter for Obesity Assessment, said the dangers to human health caused by added
sugar were such that products packed with it should carry the same warnings as
alcohol.
It was
an eye-opener: as a doctor I already knew too much of anything is bad for you,
but here was someone telling us that something most of ate unthinkingly every
day was, slowly, killing us.
Okay, sure is bad for you. How is that news? I mean in the old days prior to the ubiquity of sodas and fruit juices, getting a tasty treat was something that kids did at the local five-and-dime store. This is not news but it is definitely important information.
The
more I looked into it, the more it became abundantly clear to me that it was
sugar, not fat, which was causing so many of our problems.
Okay, this is an important distinction for people to make regarding how and why they are getting fat. Step one, reduce or eliminate the sugar. Step two, increase your fat intake. But which fat? Aha, that is the $64 question.
This
is why, along with a group of fellow medical specialists, I launched the
lobbying group Action on Sugar last year with the aim of persuading the food
industry to reduce added sugar in processed foods.
Good luck with that one. The "industry" will simply rename things, tell you its fruit juice when it is juice from the sugar cane plant. I mean they have their ways. If they're profitable, do you really think the food industry is going to comply with an edict to change their recipe? Don't make me laugh.
I would go so far as to say the change in
dietary advice in 1977 to restrict the amount of fat we were eating helped to
fuel the obesity epidemic unfolding today
He's right. It has. All in the name of reducing fat, of course.
Then
earlier this year I had another light-bulb moment.
Oh, this room is wild with lights now.
In
February Karen Thomson, the granddaughter of pioneering heart transplant
surgeon Christian Barnard, and Timothy Noakes, a highly-respected Professor of
Exercise and Sports Medicine at the University of Cape Town, invited me to
speak at the world’s first ‘low carb’ summit in South Africa.
I was
intrigued, particularly as the conference hosts are both fascinating
characters.
A
former model, Ms Thomson has courageously battled a number of addictions
including alcohol and cocaine, but lately it is another powder – one she labels
‘pure, white and deadly’ – that has resulted in her opening the world’s first
carbohydrate and sugar addiction rehab clinic in Cape Town.
Professor
Noakes, meanwhile, has recently performed a remarkable U-turn on the very
dietary advice he himself expounded for most of his illustrious career: that
is, that athletes need to load up on carbohydrates to enhance
performance.
A
marathon runner, he was considered the poster boy for high carbohydrate diets
for athletes – then he developed type 2 diabetes.
THE TERRIFYING LINK BETWEEN SUGAR AND DISEASE Effectively
tearing pages out of his own textbook, Professor Noakes has now said athletes –
and this goes for those of us who like to jog around the park too – can get
their energy from ketones, not glucose.
That
is, from fat not sugar.
Alongside
them were 15 international speakers ranging from doctors, academics and health
campaigners who between them produced an eloquent and evidence-based demolition
of 'low fat' thinking – as well as suggesting that it is carbohydrate
consumption, not fatty foods, which is fuelling our obesity epidemic.
As one scientist said: 'You don’t get fat
from eating fatty foods, just as you don’t turn green from eating green
vegetables'Opening
the conference was Gary Taubes, a former Harvard physicist who wrote The Diet
Delusion, in which he argued that it is refined carbohydrates that are
responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many other of our
Western maladies.
The
book caused controversy when it was released seven years ago, but his message
is finally gaining traction.
And
that message is this: obesity is not about how many calories we eat, but what
we eat.
Refined
carbohydrates fuel the over production of insulin, which in turn promotes fat
storage.
In
other words: it’s not calories from fat themselves that are the problem. It’s a
robust message that was reinforced time and again at the conference.
Take
Swedish family physician Dr Andreas Eenfeldt, who runs the country’s most
popular health blog Diet Doctor.
In his
home country, studies show that up to twenty three per cent of the population
are embracing a high fat, low carbohydrate diet.
A
ticking time bomb you might think – but contrary to expectations, while obesity
rates are soaring everywhere else, they are now starting to show a decline
there.
More
research on this correlation is yet to be done – but in the meantime The
Swedish Council on Health Technology has made its position clear.
After
a two-year review involving 16 scientists, it concluded that a high fat, low
carb diet may not only be best for weight loss, but also for reducing several
markers of cardiovascular risk in the obese.
A mounting slew of evidence suggests that far
from contributing to heart problems, having full fat dairy in your diet may
actually protect you from heart disease and type 2 diabetes
In
short, as Dr Eenfeldt told the conference: ‘You don’t get fat from eating fatty
foods just as you don’t turn green from eating green vegetables.’
This,
of course, is a difficult message for many to swallow; particularly for heart
patients, most of whom have spent years pursuing a low fat, low cholesterol
diet as the best way to preserve heart health.
It’s a
public health message that was first promoted in the sixties, after the
globally respected Framingham Heart study sanctified high cholesterol as a
major risk factor for heart disease.
It’s a
cornerstone of government and public health messages – yet what people didn’t
know was that the study also threw up some more complex statistics.
Like
this one: for every 1mg/dl per year drop in cholesterol levels in those who
took part in the study there was a 14 per cent increase in cardiovascular death
and an 11 per cent increase in mortality in the following 18 years for those
aged over 50.It’s
not the only statistic that doesn’t sit with the prevailing anti-cholesterol
message.
THE LINK BETWEEN FAT AND CHOLESTEROL In
2013, a group of academics studied previously unpublished data from a seminal
study done in the early seventies, known as the Sydney Diet Heart study.
They
discovered cardiac patients who replaced butter with margarine had an increased
mortality, despite a 13 per cent reduction in total cholesterol.
And
the Honolulu heart study published in the Lancet in 2001 concluded that in the
over-sixties a high total cholesterol is inversely associated with risk of
death.
Startling,
isn’t it? A lower cholesterol is not in itself the mark of success, it only
works in parallel with other important markers, like a shrinking waist size and
diminishing blood markers for diabetes.
Conversely,
a mounting slew of evidence suggests that far from contributing to heart
problems, having full fat dairy in your diet may actually protect you from
heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
What
most people fail to understand is that, when it comes to diet, it’s the
polyphenols and omega 3 fatty acids abundant in extra virgin olive oil, nuts,
fatty fish and vegetables that help to rapidly reduce thrombosis and
inflammation independent of changes in cholesterol.
Yet
full fat dairy has remained demonised – until now.In
2014, two Cambridge Medical Research Council studies concluded that the
saturated fats in the blood stream that came from dairy products were inversely
associated with type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Meaning
that in moderate amounts – no-one is talking about devouring a cheese board in
one sitting here – cheese is actually a proponent of good health and
longevity.
The
same study, incidentally, found that the consumption of starch, sugar and
alcohol encourages the production of fatty acids made by the liver that
correlate with an increased risk of these killer diseases.
HOW CARBS HAVE WRECKED THE HEALTH OF
DIABETICS It is
around type 2 diabetes, in fact, that the anti-fat pro-carb message of recent
decades has done some of the greatest damage.
A lot
of patients suffering from type 2 diabetes-–the most common kind –-are
labouring under the dangerous misapprehension that a low fat, starchy
carbohydrate fuelled diet will help their medication work most
effectively.
They
couldn’t be more wrong.
Earlier
this year, a critical review in the respected journal Nutrition concluded that
dietary carbohydrate restriction is one of the most effective interventions for
reducing features of metabolic syndrome
To
protect your heart, ditch low-fat spread for butter or, better still, a bottle
of extra virgin olive oil
It
would be better to rename type 2 diabetes 'carbohydrate intolerance disease'.
Try
telling this to the public though.
Like
the man who called into a national radio show in Cape Town on which I was
taking part to discuss the relationship between diet and heart disease.
Diagnosed
with type 2 diabetes, he was under the impression he had to consume sugar so
his diabetes medications could ‘work’ – when in fact it was going to worsen his
symptoms.
And
how many doctors and patients know that although some of these medications to
control blood sugar may marginally reduce the risk of developing kidney
disease, eye disease and neuropathy, they don’t actually have any impact on
heart attack, stroke risk or reduce death rates?
In
fact, overmedicating on diabetes drugs is actually causing dangerously low
blood sugar levels.
This
is responsible for approximately 100,000 emergency room visits per year in the
United States.
But
who can blame the public for such misguided perceptions? In my
opinion a perfect storm of biased research funding, biased reporting in the
media and commercial conflicts of interest have contributed to an epidemic of
misinformed doctors and misinformed patients.
The
result is a nation of over-medicated sugar addicts who are eating and
pill-popping their way to years of misery with chronic debilitating diseases
and an early grave.
It’s
why, these days, I very seldom touch bread, have got rid of all added sugars
and have embraced full fat as part of my varied Mediterranean-inspired
diet.
I feel
better, have more energy and – even though I didn’t set out to do so – I’ve
lost that fatty tyre around my waist, despite reducing the time I spend
exercising.
Perhaps
you can’t face making all those changes in one go. In
which case, if you do one thing, make it this: next time you are in the
supermarket and are tempted to pick up a pack of low-fat spread, buy a pack of
butter instead or, better still, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil.
Your
heart will thank you for it.
The
father of modern medicine Hippocrates once said, 'let food be thy medicine and
medicine be thy food'.
It’s
now time we let 'fat' be that medicine.
Dr
Aseem Malhotra is a cardiologist and advisor to the National Obesity Forum. @DrAseemMalhotra. He is
currently crowdfunding for his documentary film 'The Pioppi Protocol – 21 days
to whole heart health'.
This
article originally appeared on and has been reproduced with the permission of Men's Health. Read
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