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UK Food Standards Agency shows its ignorance
Part Eight: So what is the FSA playing at?
An FSA campaign aimed at cutting the consumption of crisps, biscuits, cakes and pastries may have a useful purpose as the fats used in these have been shown to be harmful, (as have the starches they include). But these fats are NOT saturated fats; they are artifically hydrogenated fats (trans-fats) which merely resemble saturated fats. There is a huge difference between the two as far as our health is concerned; lumping the two together is highly misleading. If the safest fats of all - the fats found in meat, sausages, cheese, cream, butter, and tropical oils such as coconut oil - are also to be targeted, then our health will only decline even more rapidly than it is at present.
When we talk about saturated fats these days, the popular perception is that we are talking about animal fats. But animal fats are entirely healthy. Indeed, when all the fats we ate were from animal sources -- butter, pork lard, beef dripping, cream, cheese, eggs, et cetera -- the chronic degenerative diseases that plague our lives today were either very rare or non-existent. Evidence over the last decade or so indicates that for optimum health, animal fats should provide upwards of 50% of calorie intake. We should be eating more of them, not less.
It is no coincidence that diseases such as diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's and more have taken off since 'healthy eating' was introduced by the COMA Report of 1984. These are classic cases of cause and effect. 'Healthy eating' is not the answer to the problem, it IS the problem. Until that is acknowledged, our health will only get worse.
Now, the officials at the FSA are all ‘experts’ so they must obviously know all this, mustn’t they? So the question is: why are telling us to cut down on saturated fats, when they must know that saturated fats are the healthiest fats?
But do they?
Morrie Brickman once said: “I don't know if the world is full of smart men bluffing or imbeciles who mean it.” It makes me wonder too. I can’t believe after all this time that the FSA is bluffing, so it must be the latter. In which case, why are we wasting our taxes funding them?
And they are way behind what is happening in the real world. Things are changing. There has been an enormous amount of evidence published against 'healthy eating' over the last decade. So much, in fact, that Dr Sylvan Lee Weinberg, a former President of the American College of Cardiology, a former President of the American College of Chest Physicians, editor of The American Heart Hospital Journal, and a fervent supporter of ‘healthy eating’, finally changed his mind. In a paper published in the 4 March 2004 edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Dr Weinberg issued a critique of ‘healthy eating’. The abstract of his critique reads:
‘The low-fat “diet heart hypothesis” has been controversial for nearly 100 years. The low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated vigorously . . . may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndromes. This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations, or by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question.’
Perhaps the dogma-pushers should take note. They will be living in dangerous times if those who have been harmed by following 'healthy eating' advice decide to pursue an injury claim lawsuit.
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