Fats can't be so bad, can they!

I think the message in the new book by Jennifer McLagan that fat has a undeserved bad reputation is particularly worrying. Every now and then, we have these new studies, books or other authorities that refute what we know so far and claim that their evidence proves otherwise.

McLagan claims that fat’s bad reputation comes from flawed studies that were carried out between the 1950s and 1970s, mostly by the American physiologist Ancel Keys. The data wasn’t rock solid and in three of the countries studied there was no clear link.

However, I think such claims should be treated with caution, as with so many factors interplaying it’s difficult to prove a causal relationship between what we eat and heart disease.  A study of 80,082 women found that a five percent of energy intake from saturated fat, as compared with equivalent energy intake from carbohydrates, was associated with a 17 percent increase in the risk of coronary disease. Yet, her 49,000 women study, the Women’s Health Initiative, shows there’s no impact.

McLagan says that  “nobody has ever been able to prove the supposed link between a diet high in animal fat and cardiovascular disease, and that’s why we have people such as the Inuit, who eat a lot of animal fat and who do not have high rates of heart disease”. However, the Inuit people, from the Artic region, eat seafood meat, like seals and small whales, which is high in omega-3 fatty acids. This is indicated as responsible for their low incidence of heart disease. However, they have the same level of blood pressure as those industrialized countries! So all that animal meat isn’t so good after all!

Our intake of saturated fat is one-fifth more than the upper limit set by the government. So I’m not sure that telling us fats are not so bad is a sensible move, since deterring people from eating fatty foods isn’t working yet with almost 1 in 4 people in the UK overweight!