Low Fat Lies.

Saturated fat got a bad rep in the late 1960s when a doctor named Ancel Keys presented his diet-heart hypothesis. This theory proposed that an excess of saturated fat in the diet from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs raises cholesterol which is deposited on the lining of arteries causing them to harden and narrow until blood flow is eventually stopped. Is this really the case and if so why has this low-fat approach not lowered the incidence of society’s number one killer disease, heart disease?

This week I read an article from a retired heart surgeon who basically was saying that we had got it all wrong!. After 30 years of heart operations and all the cholesterol drugs, he came to the same conclusion as me after 15 years of research that the real culprit to heart disease is in fact sugar!

It was in the 1960s after this theory “fat is bad” came into main stream media, the food industry developed this concept of low-fat diets and sugar became the new buzzword, a health craze had emerged. Processed foods, low in fiber and pumped full of sugar started to line the shelves in shops. Low fat was perceived to be healthy and fat was the reason why people would get heart disease and fat!

We were advised to eat less fat and allow sugar to fill that void. The lies of the past have lead us down the road of chronic disease. The idea of eating fat too so many seems quite frankly ludicrous.

 Whether you are a believer or not, a dietitian, a doctor, a surgeon,  disease in society is at epidemic proportions and so-called knowledgeable people are blind to what has gone on with processed foods.You may want to explain chronic disease with your genetics but your genes are no excuse to explain this rapid rise in all disease. Look at what has happened in the past and where has chronic disease come from? Have we made the wrong changes to the foods that we are eating,

We have moved from from:
– Fat to sugar

-Saturated fat to vegetable oils

– Butter to margarine

– From fresh whole foods  to toxic processed foods

– Fruits to sweets.

– From water to fizzy drinks

– Fizzy drinks to sugar-free

– Thin to fat

– From fat to obese

– Healthy to chronically sick

– From content to sad

– No stress to stressed

– Happiness to depression!
Are we blind to what has gone on?

Where has it all gone wrong? How have we allowed chronic disease in society to be the new norm. Strokes, Heart disease, Stents, Diabetes, Obesity, Cancer, heart attacks, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc the list goes on and on.

Will we ever appreciate how toxic our food is, and how disease-provoking sugar has become. Have our addictions to high carb processed foods resulted in all of the above and all of these changes that have occurred to our foods have been based on one big fat lie. Fat is really healthy and  and not to be avoided. The sickly sweet success of the sugar industry and their advertising campaigns  have many reasons to be worried.

It’s about time we returned to eating natural foods and allow our bodies to eat food that will enhance our health and not be the cause of a chronically ill society.It is about time for a change, fat is back, but processed foods have to go.

Edward O’Reilly

Lifestyle Pharmacist. 

ed@lifestylepharmacist.ie

+353 87 205 1039