Your Mother's Fatty Diet

As long as most of us can remember, we have heard the cautions about cutting down on the fat intake: use non-fat milk; margarine, not butter; yogurt, not ice cream.

The specter of XXL shopping sprees, clogged arteries, and a heart attack while running to catch a bus always seemed to pop into my visual field when staring at the dessert bar at the local buffet.

Recently, more and more research has at least been hinting (if not decisively concluding) that fat may not be the only contributory party to such conditions: studies have revealed that cutting back on fat does not always result in a lower risk of heart disease or a reduced chance of dying early. In fact, some studies show the opposite, that people who eat extremely low amounts of fat tend to die earlier.

One of the more comprehensive of those studies was published last month in the journal The Lancet. The research team found that people eating high quantities of carbohydrates, which are found in foods such as breads and rice, had a nearly 30% higher risk of dying during the study than people eating a diet low in carbohydrates.

However, the non-fat icing on this sugar-free cake was the shocking conclusion that individuals eating high-fat diets had a 23% lower chance of dying during the study’s seven years of follow-up compared to people who ate a diet lower in fat.

The study involved 135,000 people from 18 different countries, the average diet was made up of 61% carbohydrates, 23% fat and 15% protein. In China, south Asia and Africa, the amount of carbohydrates in the diet was much higher, at 63% to 67%.

It would appear that carbohydrates may be just as unhealthy, and maybe more unhealthy, than fat. This conclusion is related to the fact that carbohydrates are easily stored as glucose in the body, and they can raise blood sugar levels, contributing to obesity and diabetes — both of which are also risk factors for heart disease.

So how did we get to this seemingly confused conclusion, that seems to be negating what our loved ones and our white-coated ones have been telling us for so many years. The researchers opine it could be the case that the early studies linking fat to heart disease were conducted mostly in North America and Europe, which has the highest consumption of fat worldwide. It may be that different diet advice is needed for different populations. In western cultures, where there is an excess of fat, reducing fat may play a role in lowering heart disease, as long as people aren’t replacing the fat with carbohydrates.

In contrast, in other parts of the world, where carbohydrates make up a large part of the diet, cutting back on the carbs may be more reasonable than focusing on fat. Individuals in such societies may actually benefit from an additional increase in dietary fat intake.

In other words, don't always listen to what you are told, and watch what you eat.