Despite the now overwhelming research results indicating that saturated fats aren’t the baddies, there are still TV programmes doling out the same outdated advice. The latest was Food Ripoff introduced by that well known good health guru Gloria Hunniford. As for Dr. Christian Jessel and his team, they should be shot! It saddens me watching them repeat the same old mantra about saturated fats whilst advising obese participants in their programmes.

They also noted that studies did not lower the heart-related death rates in those subjects who lowered cholesterol, and some showed a higher all-cause mortality rate for these subjects than for those in the control group.

So for me, saturated and mon0saturated fats are in, and unsaturated fats are out.

http://www.fatinformationservice.org/news/growing-trend-for-butter-over-margarine

I wonder if this is where most of the community GPs also sit? They slavishly dish out what was the conventional wisdom about diets, treatments, diseases etc. because they fear to step out of line. As a sole voice in a multi-partnered practice, which GP would consider speaking out?

In our practice there are at least 8 GPs, even if one were enlightened enough to advise that eating saturated fats was fine, when you next visit the chances of seeing the same GP are minimal and the next one along is likely to tell you that saturated fats are the Devil’s spawn and to be avoided. You can of course make your own decision based on sites like Dr. Briffa’s but first you have to realise that not all the advice given by a GP is sensible or accurate and be prepared to go off and do your own research.

I fear many people still consider the GP to be the fount of all medical knowledge and wouldn’t think to question what they are told. As these days the media are also fighting each other over such issues as saturated fat, carb intake, fad diets etc. I think most of the population finds it easier to stick with what their GP advises.

The Daily Mail does a wonderful line in reporting a medical truism, followed some days or weeks later by an article that completely contradicts the first. Off hand I can think of sun causing melanoma v. sun not thought to be responsible for melanoma, salt being bad for you, salt not being bad for you. Confused? Well, I’m not surprised!

The Code of Advertising Standards (or whatever name it goes by) extends to cover websites and their content, so it would seem the Fat Information Service comes under the jurisdiction of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Anybody can make a mistake and adopt a falsehood for fact, but if a person insists upon propagating a falsehood after (s)he has been made aware of the mistake the that is serious misconduct, and if they make money from persisting with a lie, or assist others to make money from a lie then that is an act of fraud and if we lived in a decent world it would be treated as such.

We live in a world in which fictional markets are on the rise. A fictional market is one that generates real profits but does so off the back of false claims or half truths. Fictional markets are quite extensive and getting bigger, and the most prominent of them are backed by this cholesterol and saturated fat causes heart disease nonsense. When Mark Price, head of the supermarket Waitrose, recently said of GM, that GM was solution actively seeking a problem to solve he was quite astute in that he described a common trait of fictional markets.

Once I came to realise that polyunsaturated fats PUFAs are distinguished from saturated fats by virtue of being less stable and more reactive, and that the body utilises these attributes to use PUFAs as the parent molecules from which to build messenger molecules called eicosanoids I realised that the Goldilocks principle as applies to PUFAs and EFAs, especially the omega-6 variety that can be plentiful in margarine, is very finite indeed.

The Goldilocks principle advises too little is not enough, and that too much is downright dangerous. Over-supply of omega-6 PUFAs is very definitely risky because these species of fats are too easily damaged by oxidation, and once oxidised or radicalised they too easily do damage in turn. All EFAs and PUFAs should be consumed only in very limited quantities that should never exceed the Goldilocks zone.

I steered as clear of margarine and vegetable oils as I could and soon after I got some significant relief from some of the symptoms of type II diabetes. Most notably bouts of the muscle lethargy and mental dullness that used to be a prominent and frequent complication left me completely. Then when I began intentionally eating a low-carb / high-fat diet I was all but cured of the condition.

Bill Wilson does well to refer to Chris Masterjohn and his web presence. Chris Masterjohn is quite ardent about the dangers of over-consuming PUFAs and EFAs and his advice extends to defining the limits of these quantities.

It is fairly plain that when a body sequesters energy as body fat for use when food may not be so abundant it does so by converting excess glucose to fats. Storing fats is efficient because w/w they pack more energy, but the balance of fats that an animal (and us) will produce to store as body fat will greatly favour the families of saturated fats and mono-unsaturated fats. There is a reason: That reason is that to have a surplus of polyunsaturated fats present in body tissues poses additional risks via elevated prospects of oxidative stress.

The lately departed Barry Groves discussed PUFAs in his book ‘Trick and Treat’. His treatment is a major league exposition favouring the truth and exposing the lie. He makes the point that the different fats to be found in plants follows a simple general rule. Plants that grow in the tropics can associate with saturated fats, while plants that favour more temperate regions and endure cooler average temperatures need to associate with fats that remain fluid at lower temperatures, so for them PUFAs match their requirements. Our kind emerged in Africa, and once ate an ape-diet in which saturated fats will have accounted for a significant proportion of the calories present.

If we are prepared to be both open minded and holistic (as opposed to dogmatic through ignorance, preference, convenience, or greed) then there is no way we should rush to direct that our association with saturated fats could be in any way maladaptive and harmful. If anything, coming at this puzzle from this inclusive and evolutionary stance directs that supply of PUFAs in the quantities now available in many a modern diet is sufficiently novel, in terms of evolution and adaptation, as to look distinctly maladaptive and therefore potentially harmful.

Much as I like trying to make the truth as plain as my abilities allow, the desire to simply tell Dr Ruxton and Unilever to **** ***!! is a strong one in the face of their intransigence.

On Radio 2 last week Steve Wright and Janey Lee Grace had a brief exchange on the topic of Earthing and cast it in a positive light, so truth does get an outing sometimes, but so rarely do we humans credit the truth with the respect it deserves, and when so easily and often a bank account can be credited from the promotion of a lie.

“I’m shocked by some of the nutritional advice available on the NHS. Wholemeal bread, cereal and pasta are good for you?!?! #yeahright”

here’s a link to the article about it in The Sun and some of the comments will horrify you at just how ignorant the general public really is.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/soaps/5034239/Corrie-actress-slammed-for-tweet-about-NHS-guidelines-on-food.html

The evidence that suggests that decreasing saturated fat reduces cholesterol neglects a number of crucial issues, not least of which is the *type* of cholesterol that decreases in that context. Most cholesterol testing fails to distinguish between the kind that might signify and the kind that doesn’t, and it is the latter which decreases with the decrease in saturated fat intake.

On the other hand the evidence about the relationship between sugar, insulin and CVD is not only compelling, but demonstrates the mechanisms that connect the two quite clearly. Replacing saturated fat with PUFAs also brings its own health problems in its train…

This is really no longer much of an open question… but we seem to be condemned continually to repeat the same argumentation and to keep ‘debating’ the issue. It’s getting wearisome!

Leaving the limitations of this study aside, I’d like to pick up on your comments about credibility.

The FIS website exists to, I think persuade people that margarine in healthier than butter. The problem is, I think the evidence does not point to that at all. In fact, as I’m planning to expand on in a not-to-distant post, the evidence seems to point quite strongly in the opposite direction.

So, if someone is happy to go along with the conventional wisdom on sat fat, the perils of butter and wonders of margarine, say, then the most likely explanations are:

1. they haven’t looked at the research

2. they have looked at it but do not understand it nor how to interpret it

3. they understand it very well indeed, but will happily mislead people to (usually) make a buck

It does not matter which category someone falls into – the fact remains that if they are in any of these categories, credibility is always, ultimately, going to be an issue.

I’m surprised that the ‘Fat Information Service’ hasn’t managed to rustle up someone a little more plausible; it’s not as if they are short of money…

Yes, indeed. Quite cautious with their language, and I would say even here they are risking over-stating their findings, seeing as statistical significance disappeared once systematic differences in care or non-fat-related differences in care were controlled for.

Oh, and another thing is that any ‘benefits’ seen were only in men (women showed no benefits at all).

I don’t think the authors were as transparent as they perhaps should have been in their abstract. The loss of statistical significance when controlling for systematic differences in care and non-fat-related differences in care is important, I think, but was embedded in the text and certainly not made a feature of. There was no mention of any benefits being seen in men only in the abstract either.