If you have gained weight it’s no the fat’s fault and you have no reason to worry about your heart. Pork chops and whipped cream have nothing to do with the fat epidemic or arthrosclerosis.
Does this sound heretical? Let me explain something which few doctors and researchers know about.
One gram fat contains double the amount of calories as one gram carbohydrates or protein. Our nutrition experts and health officials seem to have logic on their side when they warn us against fatty foods.
But it’s not that simple. That one becomes fat from fat is just as true as that you become green from green vegetables. Many studies have shown that fatty foods do not fatten more than low fat foods. Much indicates just the opposite.
Fat hysteria relates to our fear of heart infarction. This was put forth in 1953 when the American physiologist Ancel Keys declared that we get heart infarctions if we eat too much fat. As evidence of this he had a diagram which showed a perfect relationship between death from cardiac episodes and the use of fat in six countries.
Meanwhile, he cheated. He had chosen countries where the numbers fit his hypothesis. The reality was that there was data from 22 countries, and when they were all included, the perfect relationship completely disappeared.
Ancel Keys came back with a new study which he called Seven Countries. This time he maintained that the amount of saturated fat in food was dangerous. The more saturated fat one ate, the higher the risk of death from heart infarction.
But the evidence did not support this. For example, seven times as many people died of heart infarctions on the Greek island of Corfu than on Crete even though they ate the same amount of fat.
More than 30 studies have subsequently shown that infarction patients have not eaten more fat than others, and as many as nine diet experiments have shown that it is not possible to reduce the risk of dying of a heart infarction by eating less saturated fat.
Despite all of these conflicting results, health officials in all countries advise against saturated fat. Instead we should use unsaturated fat.
However, fifteen years ago the dietary recommendations changed. It was shown that polyunsaturated fats in large amounts many health detrimental effects. Since then it has been recommended that our calorie needs be met by potatoes, bread, and other low fat, carbohydrate rich products. And the use of fat has gone down everywhere, but diabetes and obesity have become society wide diseases.
Many researchers have also begun to question the dietary recommendations. Those who know the scientific literature have difficulty finding anything that supports the recommendations. Many studies have shown that an effective treatment of obesity and age related diabetes it to do just the opposite of when the authorities recommend. By reducing the amount of carbohydrates in food greatly and in stead increasing the amount of fat and protein, weight it quickly reduced and all laboratory values are bettered in most people.
Those who are sceptical about what I have just written can find scientific documentation at www.thincs.org, the homepage for THINCS, The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics. It is a group of researchers, doctors, and science journalists who are better informed than most other researchers in this area. Relevant information can also be found at http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm.
1. Animal fat is not dangerous for the heart
One of the most self perpetuating myths is that animal fat (saturated fat) promotes atherosclerosis. It is completely impossible to find scientific studies which support this clam; contrarily there are many epidemiological studies which disprove it. If one compiles all of the results from all of the dietary experiments where the only treatment was reducing the amount of animal fat in the food and replacing it with something else, it becomes apparent that the number of deceased in the treatment groups and in the untreated groups is identical.
2. Atherosclerosis and heart infarction is not due to high cholesterol
All of the studies done on deceased people have shown that people with low cholesterol levels become just as atherosclerotic as people with high cholesterol levels.
In all of the studies where it was possible to stop the development of atherosclerosis experimentally, the effect was the same regardless of whether the cholesterol levels had changed. A high cholesterol level is not a risk factor for people who have passed retirement age, which is the age group which comprises more than 90 % of all deadly heart infarctions. In the cholesterol lowering experiments the effects were the same for those whose cholesterol only changes a little as those whose cholesterol level decreased by 40-50%.
3. Medicinal cholesterol reduction is ineffective and risky
Treatment with statins (cholesterol reducing medicine) has only proven to be effective in men who already suffer from heart disease, and only helps a few percent of those who are treated. Not one clinical experiment has succeeded in reducing mortality in women, in healthy men, or in the elderly. Statin treatment moreover induces cancer in animals and in the only experiment which solely including elderly people, cancer mortality increased with a statistical certainty and cancelled out the positive effect on cardiac mortality. Many side effects are also unknown by most doctors, who do not understand the damage that this treatment can cause.
4. A high cholesterol level is beneficial
Many studies have shown the elderly people with high cholesterol levels live longer than elderly people with low cholesterol levels. The most likely explanation is that the LDL molecule protects against infections. This has been shown in numerous animal experiments. In clinical studies it has been shown that people with low cholesterol levels have a higher risk of contracting infections or dying of infective disease than people with high cholesterol levels.
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About Uffe Ravnskov
Professor Uffe Ravnskov MD, PhD, Lund, is the author of The Cholesterol Myths (published in four languages) and of more than 80 cholesterol critical articles and letters in Scandinavian and international medical journals including “The British Medical Journal,” “Lancet,” “The New England Journal of Medicine,” “Circulation,” and “Science.” In his analyses of the cholesterol campaigns publications he has among other things shown how many researchers ignore all unfavourable results of cite them as if they were positive. Uffe Ravnskov is the spokesman of THINCS (The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics) and has been endowed by Dublin’s university (Trinity College) with The Skrabanek Award for original contributions in the field of medical scepticism.
