The idea that saturated fats cause heart disease was promoted by Ancel Keys, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. It started to change public health policies after Keys published his famed Seven Countries Study in 1970, which suggested that the populations that traditionally ate less meat in their diets also had lower rates of heart disease.

At around the same time, Prof. John Yudkin at Queen Elizabeth College in London was arguing that the real culprit was sugar. However, this theory was largely ignored at the time, only to be rediscovered in the past few years as accurate.

By 1977, the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was recommending a new healthy diet of 60 per cent carbohydrates and 40 per cent fats to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer and stroke.

However, the evidence for such a diet was weak, prompting Philip Handler, president of the US National Academy of Sciences at the time, to describe it as a “vast nutritional experiment”.

Not long after the new food pyramid was announced (with carbohydrates forming the base) rates of obesity rose dramatically. More worrying still, diabetes (a precursor of heart disease), and cardiovascular disease itself, also started to rise. Today, heart disease is the biggest killer in the western world.

This is because obesity and heart disease have nothing to do with the saturated fats we eat, but are caused by the higher levels of insulin our bodies are forced to produce to break down the sugars in carbohydrates, says Osama Hamdy, a diabetologist at Harvard Medical School.

The higher levels of insulin are stored as fat, which triggers inflammation that, in turn, causes insulin resistance, which leads to even more insulin being produced. The final result is atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.

As Hamdy argues, until the fats theory gained ground, diabetes has always been seen as a disease of carbohydrate (sugar) intolerance and treated with a low-carb diet. One doctor, Elliot P. Joslin, successfully treated his patients suffering from ‘fatty diabetes’ (known as Type 2 diabetes today) with a diet of just two per cent carbohydrates and 75 per cent fat.

There is a lot of confusion around what ‘good’ fats and ‘bad’ fats are. Here is a guide to help you understand fats and carbs.

Fats

Unsaturated fats. These are ‘good’ fats and come in two varieties:  monounsaturated fats, typically found in olive oil, nuts, seeds and avocados; and polyunsaturated fats, found in sunflower oil, walnuts, flaxseeds and fish. An important polyunsaturated fat is omega-3, found in oily fish, flaxseeds and walnuts.

Saturated fats. These are mainly found in meat and dairy products, such as cheese and milk, and in coconuts and coconut oil. However, saturated fats are also abundant in pizzas, biscuits, hamburgers and fast food.

Trans fats. These are created fats by a process called ‘hydrongenation’, where hydrogen is added to liquid vegetable oils to make them solid at room temperature (for ex. margarine and shortening for baking and frying food).  Partially hydrogenated oils are used by restaurants and the food industry for frying, baking and processing fast foods. Trans fats are also found naturally, in small amounts, in beef and dairy fat.

Carbs

Carbohydrates are most commonly found in sugars, fibres and starches. They provide the body with glucose (blood sugar), which is converted into energy that keeps the body functioning, and come in two forms: simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates.

Simple carbs

These can be either monosaccharides, which means they contain just one sugar, such as fructose (in fruit) and galactose (in dairy, or disaccharides, which have two or more sugars, such as sucrose (table sugar), lactose (sugar found in dairy), and maltose (beer and some vegetables).

Complex carbs

Also known as polysaccharides, these have three or more sugars. They are often found in starchy foods, such as beans, peas, lentils, potatoes, corn, parsnips, wholegrain breads and cereals.

Simple carbs give a sudden energy boost and can cause a spike in blood sugar levels, while complex carbs provide more sustained levels of energy.

On two different continents, two qualified doctors are facing tribunals due to their belief that the fat advice from the 1970s is incorrect and dangerous to our health. They have, separately, reversed a patient’s type 2 diabetes by recommending a high-fat diet (Dr Fettke in Tasmania); and giving a new mother a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet to wean her baby onto ‘real’ foods (Dr Noakes, South Africa).

Noakes argued in his hearing that the advice he had given the mother was neither unconventional nor dangerous, and that evidence supporting it can be traced as far back at the 1800s. Saturated fats are what our ancestors ate, and that was in an age when diabetes and heart disease were definitely not the epidemics they are today.

kathrynmborg@yahoo.com

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