UK Food Standards Agency shows its ignorance

Part Five: Carbohydrates and cardiovascular diseases

Recent large epidemiological studies have contradicted the traditional diet-heart disease hypothesis by finding that fat intake has no association with heart disease, whereas carbohydrate intake does.[20]

In 2005 a study conducted at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetics showed clearly that high blood glucose levels were strongly associated with heart disease.[21]

This points to ‘healthy’ carbs being the culprit – not saturated fats. It supports another strong indicator that carbohydrates are to blame from a study of coeliac patients at the University of Nottingham. Coeliacs mustn’t eat cereal grains. Although rates of heart attack and stroke were similar, adults with coeliac disease had less hypertension compared with the general population.[22]

In diabetics. ‘In general, study has demonstrated that multiple risk factors for coronary heart disease are worsened for diabetics who consume the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet so often recommended to reduce these risks.’[23] This is because high levels of glucose in the blood over a long period of time ‘glycosylate’ haemoglobin. This glycosylation was found to increase the risk of a heart attack in both diabetics and non-diabetics in another Johns Hopkins study,[24] in which non-diabetics’ risk was more than doubled.

In older women. ‘Low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets [15% protein, 60% carbohydrate, 25% fat] increase the risk of heart disease in post-menopausal women.’[25]

In the elderly. We have known for a very long time that blood cholesterol levels tend to increase as we get older. Several studies from around the world show that the elderly with high cholesterol live longer than those with low cholesterol. An East German doctor, Max Bürger, demonstrated almost half a century ago that, as we age, cholesterol is lost from body tissues and neurons (brain cells).[26]

These findings were published in Leipzig during the Communist era, so it is unlikely that any western clinician has ever seen, let alone read them. Putting these two facts together, is it not probable that the increases in blood cholesterol seen as we age are our bodies’ way of replacing cholesterol lost from tissues and nerve cells?

This has huge implications in the context of ‘healthy eating’. Advice today is aimed at lowering cholesterol levels in people of all ages, but these facts together suggest that drug or dietary regimes aimed at lowering cholesterol in people aged over 70 might shorten their lives.

In everyone. In 2000, scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine, California, compared the effects of a low-fat, high-carb diet with a high-fat, low-carb diet, on blood fats and cholesterol. They found that subjects on the high-carb diet had significantly higher blood triglycerides and significantly lower HDL. These effects are not desirable. The authors concluded:

‘Given the atherogenic potential of these changes in lipoprotein metabolism, it seems appropriate to question the wisdom of recommending that all Americans should replace dietary saturated fat with [carbohydrate].’[27]

Similarly, while presenting two-year results of the Glucose Abnormalities in Patients with Myocardial Infarction (GAMI) study at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2004,[28]

Dr Lars of the Rydén Karolinska University Hospital, Solna, Sweden, said that abnormal glucose metabolism is common in acute heart attack patients. Even high-normal levels, below the diagnostic target for diabetes, increase the risk for mortality and cardiovascular disease. Forget cholesterol; the strongest predictor of a future heart attack was high blood glucose. The following year another study confirmed that when blood glucose levels were raised for significant lengths of time, the risk of a heart attack was greatly increased.[29] Long-term blood glucose levels are measured by the amount they glycosylate haemoglobin. The measurement is known as ‘HbA1c’ or ‘haemoglobin A1c’. What this study showed was that, in diabetic adults, each 1% increase in HbA1c increased the risk of a heart attack by 14%. And in non-diabetics with a level of over 4.6%, each 1% increase in HbA1c increased the risk of a heart attack by a huge 136%. Long-term high glucose levels are, of course, only caused by eating a ‘healthy’ diet.

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