A UK cardiologist says it is time "to bust the myth of the role of saturated fat in heart disease," pointing out that since we started following advice to remove it from our diets, cardiovascular risk has gone up.
Writing in this week's online issue of the British Medical Journal Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital, London, also says government obsession with reducing total cholesterol has led to millions of people being overmedicated with statins, when the real issue is not cholesterol but a more complex triad of lipid abnormalities called "atherogenic dyslipidemia."
He describes how the "seven countries" landmark study of the 1970s, showed links between rates of coronary heart disease and cholesterol levels, and linked this to energy levels from saturated fats. But without establishing whether these factors were actually causing heart disease, governments pushed out guidelines telling us to cut fat intake to 30% of total calories and saturated fat to 10%.
In the meantime, "recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk," and "Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective," he adds.
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