UK Food Standards Agency shows its ignorance

Part Six: High-fat, low-carb diets reduce heart disease risk

By the end of the 20th century, low-carb diets were becoming increasingly popular and nutritionists kept insisting that they would increase cholesterol. In 2002, scientists at the University of Connecticut decided to test this claim with a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet on normal-weight men with normal cholesterol levels. The diet contained only 8% of calories from carbs, with 61% of their calories from fats.[30]

With a diet in which nearly two-thirds of calories came from fat, you might expect – because that is what you have been led to believe – that cholesterol would rise. In fact, it did just the opposite: cholesterol actually fell by 29% and HDL went up by more than 11%. But this wasn’t all: triglycerides, which are more harmful in terms of heart disease, fell by a whopping 33% and insulin fell by 34%.

That last study covered only six weeks. In the same year, doctors at the Division of General Internal Medicine, Duke University, conducted a similar six-month study.[31]

Patients could eat as much meat, cheese, eggs, fish, butter and fat as they wanted, but their carb intake was restricted to no more than 25 grams a day. Over the period of the study, the participants lost an average of 9.7 kilograms (21.3 lbs), their cholesterol fell by 6.1%, there was an almost 40% drop in the level of triglycerides in their blood and their HDL increased by about 7%. In an interview for Reuters Health, the study’s main author, Dr Eric Westman, said: ‘We were somewhat surprised to find that patients’ blood lipid profiles improved, even though there was much more fat in the diet. We had thought the fat in the diet would increase the cholesterol.’

Summary

Ever since ‘healthy eating’ was introduced in the 1980s, the establishment has tried to show that a diet high in animal fat is harmful. Yet not a single trial has ever managed to do this. This might surprise you, but it should not as it was shown as long ago as 1968 that ‘hyperlipidaemia [high blood fats] can be controlled by a diet which is low in unsaturated fat . . .’[32] (emphasis added).

You see, the only fats that have ever been implicated in heart disease are polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

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