Sod The Sugar And The Salt We’re Allowed To Eat Fat Again
SO. Everything that we’ve been told about healthy eating for the past 30 years has turned out to be a mistake. Or a lie, your call:
For the health conscious reader who has been stoically swapping butter for margarine for years the next sentence could leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Scientists have discovered that saturated fat does not cause heart disease while so-called ‘healthy’ polyunsaturated fats do not prevent cardiovascular problems.
In contrast with decades old nutritional advice, researchers at Cambridge University have found that giving up fatty meat, cream or butter is unlikely to improve health.
They are calling for guidelines to be changed to reflect a growing body of evidence suggesting there is no overall association between saturated fat consumption and heart disease.
Yes, it is real research, no it’s not just Daily Mail style immigrant butter causes house cancer type stuff. Looking back at all the studies that have actually been done on the relationship between eating fat, even saturated fat, and heart disease the researchers manage to find no link between the two at all. So yes, everything we’ve been told about a healthy diet for the past 30 years is indeed wrong.
But there’s a much bigger implication to this as well. You’ll have seen the two campaigns in recent years over salt and sugar in our foods. To the point that there are people running around now insisting that sugar is in fact toxic. And the salt people (often the very same people in fact) insisted that that compound caused all the strokes in everyone. Despite the very dodgy statistics upon which the claim was made.
But OK, let’s just take it at face value: OK, so why are food manufacturers loading up processed foods with salt and sugar? Well, it’s a desperate attempt to make them taste of some fucking thing given that we’ll all had the shit scared out of us about eating anything with fat in it. And that fat is usually where all the flavour is as well. So the new findings allow us to kill three birds with one stone. We can reduce the salt and sugar we ingest by simply going back to those full fat versions of everything. They just don’t need as much seasoning and flavouring. Our second bird is that we will be eating better and more healthily anyway. And our third is that we get to ignore those loons over in the public health community on two grounds. Firstly that they’ve been wrong for thirty years already and secondly that we’ve just solved the salt and sugar thing they’re currently complaining about.
Sounds like a pretty good idea really: all I’ve got to do now is convince my wife to allow me to eat butter again rather than margarine…..
Posted: 18th, March 2014 | In: Money, Reviews, The Consumer Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
