I am a strong believer that fat is good for you. It is an endless cause of dispute with friends and work colleagues who have fully bought into the “low-fat and plenty of oats” diet principle. Some argue that the fat is bad for your heart, others just argue that you can’t possibly lose weight on a high fat diet.
My own fat loss journeys are sufficient proof to me that the latter is definitely not true. While I don’t take in too much fat, my diet is principally fat and protein with minimal carbs. However, what about the idea that fat is bad for your general health and well-being, in particular that it is bad for your heart?
April was an exciting month in research circles regarding this topic and some of the ideas that saturated fat isn’t bad for you even started to filter into the general public through the media. I’ve collected together a few of the most relevant or interesting posts and articles that were published at the time to give you a good starting point if you ever have to defend your fat-consumption to someone (or if you need a bit of convincing yourself).
Pot roast - plenty of saturated fat doesn't have to be a bad thing
- Let’s kick off with a good all-rounder article. Dr Briffa has reviewed a study carried out over an average of 12 years with 53,000 participants, looking at the relationship between eating habits and the risk of heart attack. As Dr Briffa points out, the study claimed to conclude that replacing saturated fatty acids with low-GI carbs reduced the risk of heart attack, while replacement with high-GI carbs created a higher risk of heart attack. However the results actually show that low-GI carbs made no change to the risk of heart attack when compared to the saturated fatty acids diets. So that’s a massive study supporting the idea that cutting out the fat and replacing it with carbs will not reduce the risk of heart attacks, despite what we are told by the medical profession (and despite what the researchers tried to force the results to show).
- A study by Houston et al with a simple abstract was published in late March. This study looked at the connection between diet (specifically carbs, dietary fat and egg consumption) and cardiovascular disease in older adults (those in the 70-79 age range). The researchers concluded that there were no significant associations between dietary fats and cardiovascular disease while there was a clear correlation between cardiovascular disease and both dietary cholesterol and egg consumption. Thankfully the researchers took this a step further to understand the correlation that was found. This concluded that the correlation with both dietary cholesterol and egg consumption was only evident in those test subjects who had type 2 diabetes. So dietary fats are exonerated (again).
- Dan Hubbard wrote a brilliant article in mid-March on “The Exoneration of Bacon: Saturated Fat is Healthy”. I was particularly interested by his observation that the earliest reports of heart disease were on rare occasions in the 1920s while “animal fat consumption decreased significantly from 1910-1970 due to the increased prevalence of processed foods and fear of the animal fat’s and cholesterol’s proposed negative relationship with heart disease. Concurrently, processed vegetable oils and processed carbohydrates increased significantly because of cheaper costs and longer shelf-lives.
- This link may not seem to be related to fat at a first glance, but bear with me for a moment. The Whole Health Source blog ran an article about copper deficiency and cardiovascular disease. If you speak to a medical professional in the Western world you will find that the common belief is that cardiovascular disease is caused by consumption of too much saturated fat. This hypothesis was “bolstered by some encouraging findings and zealous personalities” and subsequently took the western world by storm. One of the key studies behind this was carried out by Dr Ball in 1963 where classic symptoms of cardiovascular disease were seen in mice fed on a diet rich in saturated fat. However, in 1985 Dr Klevay was able to replicate the same study, preventing all the cardiovascular disease symptoms by supplementing the diet of the mice with copper. This study, alongside various other studies that also show cardiovascular disease appearing in copper deficient animals, suggests that copper deficiency rather than excess saturated fat is the guilty party in cardiovascular disease. I’d certainly include this article in a list of must-read articles for anyone who believes that consumption of saturated fat is bad for you.
- Finally, we have something on timing of fat consumption. A study looked at the timing and concluded that fat intake at the time of waking appeared to turn on fat metabolism efficiently and also the ability to respond to different food types later in the day while those fed carbohydrates when they woke had carbohydrate metabolism turned on and this stayed on all day, promoting carbohydrate utilisation for the rest of the day. This links in with fat-burning but has also supported my previous belief that if you want to most easily convert to a fat-adapted lifestyle you should start by converting your breakfast from toasts, cereals and other traditional carbohydrate breakfasts to a fat-based breakfast before trying to change other meals.
Omlette muffins - in support of eggs for breakfast, even if you are eating on the move
I hope you found those helpful. I’ll carry on fuelling my life with plenty of meat and eggs now!
Related posts:
No Comments so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.