Our bodies are
engineered to consume eggs and animal fats safely. They were not engineered to eat to eat
polyunsaturated fats. That mere fact
alone should have been warning enough.
Our problem is simply too much of any of it and most surely way too much
of grain based products.
Animal products
with ample vegetables are apparently quite safe and many traditional diets are
all about just that.
What is coming
home to roost is our promotion of starches and sugars over the past century
into being a large part of our diet.
Switching from every day to once a month is what we should be
doing. Of course that is hard to
accomplish and it is been implemented in many different ways by many.
Why Almost
Everything you've been Told About Unhealthy Foods is Wrong
Eggs and red meat have both been on the nutritional
hit list – but after a major study last week dismissed a link between fats and
heart disease, is it time for a complete rethink?
By Joanna Blythman
March 24, 2014
Could eating too much margarine be bad for your
critical faculties? The “experts” who so confidently advised us to replace
saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who
presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and
seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script.
Last week it fell to a
floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson,
from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment’s anti-saturated fat doctrine
when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving
more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found
that saturated fat consumption was not associated with
coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that
concluded “there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart
disease”.
Neither could the foundation’s research team find
any evidence for the familiar assertion that trips off the tongue of margarine
manufacturers and apostles of government health advice, that eating
polyunsaturated fat offers heart protection. In fact, lead researcher Dr Rajiv
Chowdhury spoke of the need for an urgent health check on the standard healthy
eating script. “These are interesting results that potentially stimulate new
lines of scientific inquiry and encourage careful reappraisal of our current
nutritional guidelines,” he said.
Chowdhury went on to warn that replacing saturated
fats with excess carbohydrates – such as white bread, white rice and potatoes –
or with refined sugar and salts in processed foods, should be discouraged.
Current healthy eating advice is to “base your meals on starchy foods”, so
if you have been diligently following that dietetic gospel, then the
professor’s advice is troubling.
Confused? Even borderline frustrated and beginning
to run out of patience? So was the BBC presenter tasked with getting clarity
from the British Heart Foundation. Yes, Pearson conceded, “there is not enough
evidence to be firm about [healthy eating] guidelines”, but no, the findings
“did not change the advice that eating too much fat is harmful for the heart”.
Saturated fat reduction, he said, was just one factor we should consider as
part of a balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle. Can you hear a drip, drip in
the background as officially endorsed diet advice goes into meltdown?
Of course, we have already had a bitter taste of how
hopelessly misleading nutritional orthodoxy can be. It wasn’t so long ago
that we were spoon-fed the unimpeachable “fact” that we should eat no more than
two eggs a week because they contained heart-stopping cholesterol, but that gem of nutritional wisdom had to be
quietly erased from history when research showing that cholesterol in
eggs had almost no effect on blood cholesterol became too
glaringly obvious to ignore.
The consequences of this egg restriction nostrum
were wholly negative: egg producers went out of business and the population
missed out on an affordable, natural, nutrient-packed food as it mounded up its
breakfast bowl with industrially processed cereals sold in cardboard boxes. But
this damage was certainly less grave than that caused by the guidance to
abandon saturated fats such as butter, dripping and lard, and choose instead
spreads and highly refined liquid oils.
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