The more I look into this the more fascinating it gets.
If you accept the argument that fat isn't actually bad for you (and the facts do seem very plausible) then it turns the whole healthy eating movement upside down. It would appear that food manufacturers have been taking fat out of food to sell it to us as "healthy", whilst substituting sugar instead. Looking at food labels, there often seems more added sugar in supposed healthy wholemeal breads than in plain white loaves. Skimmed milk (a totally worthless product nutritionally) has more than three times the sugar content of double cream! Apparently, it is the fat in the milk that actually contains most of the vitamins and minerals, so taking it out reduces the nutritional value, so given that there is slightly less sugar in full fat milk than in skimmed milk that makes full fat milk the healthier of the two.
Just checked my fridge and found the following sugar content per 100g: low fat creme fraiche 3.7g, low fat yoghurt 6.5g, double cream 1.6g! Even more scary, I added up the sugar content of what I thought was yesterday's healthy breakfast - a bowl of Special K with semi-skimmed milk and a 150ml glass of freshly squeezed 100% natural apple juice - it came to over 9 teaspoons worth of sugar!! Boy did I tuck into today's breakfast with relish - three rashes of Gloucester Old Spot streaky bacon and 4 Legbar eggs scrambled with a knob of butter. That is the real healthy option breakfast it would seem.
It all starts to make sense when you consider a few basic facts: man has evolved a digestive system over millions of years designed to take what the body needs from whatever food he has hunted/caught/foraged naturally. This would have included a lot of saturated animal fat. Refined sugar has only been around for a few hundred years and the body hasn't yet (and I suspect it won't for a while) evolved a method of processing it in the same way. There doesn't appear to be much evidence to support the common theory that eating saturated fat has any bearing on the actual amount of cholesterol in the blood. The body takes what it needs and disposes of the rest. Until sugar comes along. Not only does sugar accumulate in body fat in its own right, but in increasing insulin levels in the body it would appear to inhibit the ability of the body to dispose of unwanted saturated fat - a double whammy.
Until the 1970's we were happily tucking into saturated fats without a care in the world, and only 6% of the population was deemed overweight. Then along came the healthy eating lobby and started replacing "fatty" foods with carb laden "healthy" alternatives. Forty years on and two thirds of the population is obese or overweight, and Type 2 diabetes has risen by a similar amount. The same is true for the USA. And it's not down to exercise levels either.
It will be very interesting to watch how this plays out in the world of professional nutritionists, not to mention Government eating guidelines. I can't imagine that either will be in a hurry to admit that they have been getting it wrong for the past forty years, let alone take responsibility for causing an obesity epidemic throughout the first world. And what about the multi-billion dollar global food industry, built on false premises of healthy eating? I don't think the tobacco companies have yet admitted that smoking might be bad for you so I wouldn't expect to see the end of "low fat healthy alternatives" any time soon.
On a personal level I don't thing this will much affect the way I eat. I have long felt that if food come in a packet with a long list of ingredients then it probably isn't good for you, so there is seldom much processed food in the house. Fortunately, I don't have a sweet tooth and wouldn't care if I never ate another cake, biscuit or bar of confectionery. As long as my food comes fresh from a butcher/fishmonger/greengrocer, and has not been fiddled with by men in white coats then I shall eat what I like. One thing that will change is that I will no longer feel guilty tucking into a chunk of cheese, or making cream laden sauces (forget the low fat creme fraiche from now on) or feel compelled to cut the delicious outer layer of fat off a lamb chop or piece of steak. And as for that strange thread about giving up drinking wine... what an utterly bizarre notion
