It’s been heralded as the tipping point in the official guidance we’ve been given about healthy eating over the past 40 years. The saturated fats we eat—mainly from meat, butter and cheese—don’t clog our arteries and
It’s been heralded as the tipping point in the official guidance we’ve been given about healthy eating over the past 40 years. The saturated fats we eat—mainly from meat, butter and cheese—don’t clog our arteries and cause heart disease after all, and all along, the real culprit has been sugar.
Obesity, diabetes and heart disease are related to insulin intolerance, new research is discovering. Insulin breaks down the sugars in carbohydrates, so the more carbohydrates we eat, the more insulin is produced. But this can reach overload when we eat lots of carbohydrates that have added sugar—such as found in processed and ‘white’ foods. The extra insulin gets stored as fat and so begins the inflammatory process that leads to diabetes and heart disease.
Yet, the saturated fats theory gave birth to the multibillion low-fat and diet-food industry—and ironically launched processed foods that are high in sugar—and doctors are only now beginning to accept it was based on bad science or, sometimes, no science at all.
Over the years, health advisors have been recommending we eat less and less saturated fat and, today, we are told that saturated fat should make up no more than 10 per cent of our total daily caloric intake.
But it now looks like that advice was wrong, although it’s not going down without a fight. Two doctors, one in South Africa and the other in Australia, have been facing disciplinary charges for advocating a high-fat diet, with one of them having to defend an additional charge that he “inappropriately reversed a patient’s type 2 diabetes” by changing the patient’s diet.
A tipping point
A pivotal moment for the fats theory happened last December, when the British Medical Journal (BMJ) refused to retract an article that had criticized the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) for continuing to advocate a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet for heart health.
The US advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) had campaigned to have the article withdrawn, but two independent reviewers looked at the evidence and agreed with the article’s conclusions that the DGAs had ignored swathes of evidence that contradicted the low-fat theory. Worse, the reviewers—Mark Helfand, at Oregon Health & Science University, and Lisa Bero, at the University of Sydney—said that advocates of the diet had conflicts of interest. In other words, those scientists had been funded by a food industry bankrolled by its low-fat products.
Ignoring the evidence
The original article—by investigative journalist Nina Teicholz—hadn’t pulled its punches. Teicholz, who also wrote the book The Big Fat Surprise (Simon & Schuster, 2014), had been commissioned by the BMJ to look at the science behind the DGAs’ dietary guidelines for 2015, a review it undertakes every five years.1
Its latest guidelines recommend that we should get just 10 per cent of our calories from saturated fat in meat and dairy, and advises that we follow one of three healthy diets: the healthy vegetarian diet; the healthy Mediterranean-style diet; or the healthy US-style diet.
But, argues Teicholz, the DGAs committee of 15 experts had either ignored recent evidence contradicting the low-fat theory or placed too much significance on other studies. The recommendations for the three diets were also based on a “minuscule quantity of rigorous evidence” that “only marginally supports claims that these diets can promote better health than alternatives”.
Within days of the BMJ declaration—hailed by Prof Tim Noakes, a South African expert in nutrition, as “a tipping point”—a group of around 200 Canadian doctors presented an open letter to their government urging radical reform of its advice on nutrition. They pointed out that there has been an explosion in rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease in the 40 years since the low-fat diet has been promulgated.
In fact, the diet actually worsens the risk factors for heart disease, they argue, and they also say that doctors and nutritionists should be free to advocate other dietary approaches, such as the low-carb diet, for people with diabetes and heart disease.
These demands echo those of the US Nutrition Coalition and the UK Public Health Collaboration, which are also calling for more open discussion about diet and the failings of the low-fat approach.
Such calls for greater freedom of speech—and freedom to treat—follow hearings against two doctors who had prescribed a high-fat diet to their patients. Dr Gary Fettke, an orthopaedic surgeon in Tasmania, has subsequently been barred by Australia’s medical governing body from recommending the diet or even talking about it, while the case against Prof Noakes in South Africa is ongoing.
Since the gag order on Dr Fettke last November, he now faces new charges that he reversed a patient’s type 2 diabetes “inappropriately”—by recommending a high-fat diet.
The new charge was made almost immediately after a secret hearing of Australia’s medical regulator, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), banned Dr Fettke from talking about a high-fat diet or treating patients with it.
The original case was brought by a dietitian—who has remained anonymous—who claims Fettke wasn’t qualified to recommend a dietary approach.
It’s the diet
In his testimony, Dr Fettke, who practises in Tasmania and lectures at the loc