Excerpt from a coming book by Uffe Ravnskov (in search of a publisher)
News from the WHO - A Dietary U-Turn
After
almost twenty years of meticulous reading of the scientific reports about diet
and cardiovascular disease I haven’t found any valid argument against
saturated fat. Instead, there are a large number of contradictory observations. But if you ask
the authorities they withhold their warnings by referring to the 2003
WHO/FAO Expert Consultation. Let us therefore see what "the worlds best
experts" have to say about it.
According
to that paper, “the relationship between dietary fats and CVD (cardiovascular
disease), especially coronary heart disease, has been extensively investigated,
with strong and consistent associations emerging from a wide body of evidence”.
This statement was followed by a reference to a
consensus report from the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart
Association. The only evidence presented in that report are studies claiming
that saturated fat raises cholesterol, and a
single study claiming that intake of saturated fat may cause myocardial
infarction.
The
first argument is not true, as you know already and the second is not true
either. However, in the summary of that paper you can read that “our findings
suggest that replacing saturated and trans unsaturated fats with unhydrogenated
monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is more effective in preventing
coronary heart disease in women than reducing overall fat intake.”
You
would probably think that the study was a dietary trial, but it was not. It was
a study of 80,000 healthy nurses who had been studied for almost twenty years.
At the start of the study and every following year, the researchers from Harvard
asked them about their usual diet. At the end of the study the diet of those who
had suffered a heart attack was compared with the diet of those who had remained
healthy. The term “replacing” did not mean that they had replaced anything;
it was a result of complicated statistical calculations based on the dietary
information. The truth is, that on average there were just as many heart attacks
among those who had the lowest intake of saturated fat as among those with the
highest; this fact appears clearly from the tables in their report. Neither has
any of the Harvard-researchers previous reports shown that.
Recently
(September 2009) a new WHO-report was published entitled Fats
and Fatty Acid Requirements for Adults. In co-operation with FAO twenty-eight
experts had been selected to scrutinize the scientific literature about dietary
fat. This time the authors have looked at all types of studies and realized that
something is wrong. For instance, on page 191 two of the authors declare that ”the
available evidence from cohort and randomised controlled trials is
unsatisfactory and unreliable to make judgement about and substantiate the
effects of dietary fat on risk of CHD-
But
don’t we get diabetes if we eat too much saturated fat? This is what we have
been told for many years.
No,
no. On page 239 you can read that “there is insufficient evidence
at this time to determine the association between diabetes risk and intake of
total fat or of any particular type of fat”.
And
on the same page you can read that “the data on the association between
total fat intake and saturated fat intake and body weight remain inconclusive”.
Are
we now allowed to feast on good animal food again without being anxious about our health?
Oh
no, it takes time to change old habits. On page 60 Elmadfa and Kornsteiner
declare that “there is convincing evidence that substituting SFA (saturated
fatty acids) with mainly PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) reduces the risk of
CHD (coronary heart disease)”. And they continue with the following
statement: “The intake of saturated fatty acid should not exceed a MAL
(maximum level) of 10%E (10 % of the total caloric intake) to keep cholesterol
levels in a normal range and to reduce the risk of CHD”.
Obviously
the twenty-eight authors haven’t conferred with each other because Skeaff and
Miller’s figure 12 clearly shows that a high intake of
PUFAs is associated with an increased risk of dying from heart disease,
whereas figure 8 shows no association with intake of SFA.