For years, we've been told fat clogs our arteries. Now, scientists say that's all wrong.
This article by Katherine Ellen Foley for Quartz may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
In an article published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (an affiliate of BMJ) on April 25, researchers from the UK and California reviewed all the existing studies about cholesterol and heart disease. Based on all the published literature, “the conceptual model of dietary saturated fat clogging a pipe is just plain wrong,” they write.
Cholesterol isn’t totally blameless in the world of heart disease. They do form little bubbles inside arteries “like pimples,” write the researchers, and often cause heart attacks when they burst.
But coronary artery disease is just that—a disease. It’s a result of constant inflammation. In all the studies they could find, lowering fat levels in diets failed to reduce heart attacks, strokes, or other kinds of heart disease. Although cholesterol from fats is bad, it’s been overly vilified.What does work to prevent heart disease, though, is exercise. Walking 22 minutes a day (about 150 minutes per week) can help reduce heart disease, with a balanced diet that contains a combination of fruits, veggies, and fats from both plants and animals.
These two papers aren’t saying that high-fat diets are good for you, but fats—including the saturated ones—may not be as bad as was once thought. The reality is our perception of fats has probably been skewed by the results that have been reported, both in journals and the media.
Dietary advice is as prone to fads as fashion trends and what is seen as rock solid truth in one decade is debunked as patently false the next. That gives us a lesson for markets where the perception of surety is integral to the persistence of a bull market only to eventually be displaced when the biggest bull becomes the epicentre of risk.
It has always seemed disingenuous to say that fats are bad when French, German, Italian and Japanese diets are loaded with fats and yet their populations do not experience even close to the same levels of obesity as the USA and also have higher life expectancies. If fats, either “good” or “bad”, are not the problem then perhaps it is reasonable to look for culprits in inactivity and sugar consumption.
Stress and the psychological dietary compensations we indulge in to deal with it are an additional consideration. I wonder how long it will take for mental health to become the next dietary fad.
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