Over the past few years I've been trying to explore in this blog our animal instincts and the ways in which they find expression among us, humans. Recently my attention has been focussed on the most basic instinct of all, feeding. What I have eaten has been influenced, not only by the agricultural and cooking cultures in which I was brought up, and the wider cooking culture as presented by the mass media, but by advice, claiming to be scientific, about the health benefits and hazards of certain foods.
For most of my life I ate what I was told was healthy – plenty of fibre, fruit, vegetables and whole grains. I consumed relatively little red meat and fat (vegetable rather than animal). Yet, nine years ago, to the accompaniment of an increase in weight for which cutting calories and being very active were no antidotes, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, one of the diseases associated with what we call civilisation, and one which is now being included in metabolic syndrome, whose other manifestations are obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. Alzheimer's disease is even now referred to as Type 111 diabetes.
I think you will understand that I have good reason to check whether the dietary guidelines, which ever shriller voices and colour-coded products urge me to follow, are based on sound science. Reading all the relevant original research in the fields of anthropology, endocrinology, and medicine is out of the question. What I have found, read and re-read is Gary Taubes' monumental and riveting book, The Diet Delusion. I have also read his more recent and more accessible work, Why We Get Fat. Gary Taubes strikes me as someone who has the ability, the energy and the time to seek out the relevant investigations, and appraise them critically and with as much fairness as is humanly possible.
For decades I have been living inside a mental shield which has deflected fat and especially animal fat. It was with a sense of freedom that I read about studies like the Women's Health Initiative which involved 49 000 women. Of these 20 000, randomly chosen, were put for six years on a diet low in fat and saturated fat, with less meat, more fruit and more wholegrain than the remaining 29 000 women. Over the six years their total fat consumption was reduced by 25%. The diet was found to have no protective effect against heart disease, stroke, breast cancer or colon cancer.
The USA's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's decade long Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial had already shown that heart disease in men was not prevented by eating a diet low in fat and low in saturated fat. In 2001 the Cochrane Collaboration carried out a review of the literature. They found only twenty trials since the 1950s which were carried out sufficiently rigorously to be included, and reported they could find no association between eating less fat and less saturated fat with coronary heart disease.
I'll write more about animal fat in my next post.
