UK Food Standards Agency shows its ignorance

Part Nine: A case history perhaps we should learn from

Dr Annika Dahlqvist, a Swedish GP, worked as a physician at a local health centre. She had a good job, and was very popular with her patients. But she committed a cardinal sin. She prescribed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat, ketogenic diet to her patients. While diabetics under other doctors became steadily worse, her patients got better. The sin was that she didn’t follow official protocol; she did what worked. And it cost her her job.

Three years ago Dr Dahlqvist was reported to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare by two dieticians. She was forced to quit helping by health centre management and accused of malpractice. Rather than stop, she chose to work elsewhere.

Dr Dahlqvist was acquitted last year by the newly appointed Chief of the Health and Welfare Department. At the same time he sacked the three official experts who had developed the high-carb, low-fat dietary guidelines for diabetics, because of their financial bonds to the food industry.

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare found that Dr Dahlqvist’s prescribing a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet for diabetes patients was ‘in accordance with science and good practice’ and she ws reinstated.

Perhaps we should take similar action against those who don't seem to have our best interests at heart.

Conclusion

Dr T. L. Cleave wrote: ‘For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I ever heard in my life.’

He was right, of course. When all the fats we ate were 'saturated fats' from butter, lard, eggs, beef dripping, and tropical oils, heart disease was unheard of, cancers were a lot rarer, as were obesity and diabetes. It's only since we swapped these natural fats for margarines and cooking oils that a wide range of chronic degenerative diseases have gotten worse.

What the FSA should be warning us against are the trans-fats found in hydrogenated vegetable oils and margarines. These are artificially ‘saturated’ polyunsaturated fats and have been shown to be harmful to our health. They are found in a wide range of commercial products such as biscuits, pastries, cakes and so on, as well as margarines and cooking oils.

They should not be telling us to cut down on natural, beneficial saturated fats.

Unfortunately, the FSA doesn't seem to know the difference between them. It lumps the two types together and labels them both 'saturated fats'. Then says that these 'saturated fats' are harmful.

The good news is: We don't need to do as they say. The bad news is that we have to pay their salaries! Or should we follow the example set in Sweden, and sack them? That is what I would like to see.

Natural fats and oils found in both animal fats and tropical oils, as well as cold-pressed oils such as olive oil, are entirely natural parts of our diet, and entirely healthy.

Not only should we eat saturated fats in preference to processed polyunsaturated fats and oils and carbohydrates, we should also eat more saturated fats, not less.

While dogma-ridden dictocrats and ‘experts’ are given free rein to parrot unsupported and dangerous advice, while the evidence against it is so obvious to see walking on our streets, our health will decline even more rapidly.

And, by the way, if you stuffed 'healthy' bread, pasta and fruit down the sink drain, that would block it too!

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Last updated 13 February 2009