Fed up with being fed lies about saturated fats

08 March 2017 - 15:05 By Andrea Burgener
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There is no food containing fat which doesn't contain all three types of fat; saturated, mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated. Salmon, for instance, has around 3.5 grams saturated fat per 100g.
There is no food containing fat which doesn't contain all three types of fat; saturated, mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated. Salmon, for instance, has around 3.5 grams saturated fat per 100g.
Image: iStock

Andrea Burgener finds no logic to the health guidelines about 'good' and 'bad' fats

It defies belief. A large proportion of the medical profession, including dieticians, continues to be absolutely clueless about nutrition.

The latest research put out by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, follows the same tired lines as the usual gumph trotted out over the past decades.

Their information on fats, as per the current mainstream line, is a joke. As per usual, it's the simplistic animal-fats-bad, plant-fats-good theory. So olive oil, canola and sunflower oil are given equal footing (in itself bizarre) and decreed good, but the following are baddies: first up ''added fats".

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What the hell is the definition of an added fat anyway? Is added olive oil okay? Does butter do something different to your body if you add it at the table and not while cooking?

Then we come to eggs and organ meats, chosen as demonic, of course, because of their saturated fat levels, and lumped in with deep-fried foods!

This mad division between animal fats and ''plant" fats was created decades ago, when saturated fat was suddenly made the baddie during the invention of the fairy-tale that links ''high" cholesterol to heart disease.

The thing is, though, that these medical guidelines don't seem to understand the composition of foods. There is no food containing fat which doesn't contain all three types of fat; saturated, mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated. That's not my opinion, it's just how the world is.

Anyway, all that the word saturated means in this context is that within the fat molecule, the carbon atoms are fully ''saturated" with hydrogen atoms, which in fact makes the molecule more stable.

Olive oil is in everyone's good camp, right? Well gram for gram it has way more saturated fat than a piece of pork loin (including lard). Yes, you'd probably eat more pork than oil in a sitting, but you see the point.

block_quotes_start Gram for gram, olive oil has way more saturated fat than a piece of pork loin (including lard) block_quotes_end

Fish is generally declared outright as much better than red meat for its ''good fats" profile. But if salmon has around 3.5 grams saturated fat per 100g and beef has around 6 grams per 100g, aren't we being a little silly?

Yes to sunflower oil and no to eggs? We don't think it's bonkers that an industrially produced, highly processed food is a better choice than an item eaten by humans since humans and eggs co-existed?

There is no logic here at all. The worst part of their nutritional advice is the warning that saturated fat intake is linked to diabetes! It's plain scary what levels are misinformation are being fed to us. We should certainly be choosing our fats carefully, but for entirely different reasons.

Fats found in their natural state in whole foods are ALL fine. It's man-made fats (which include super-heated sunflower oil) that are the killers.

• This article was originally published in The Times.

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