Fats and diet

I came across an interesting post at the Harvard School of Public Health. I've thought for a while that eating margarine instead of butter was a bit strange due to amount of chemicals in margarine but all this was due to the advice from 'professionals' to cut your fat intake. This article seems to backpedal a bit and says that actually - natural fats are essential and the advice to follow a low fat diet may be wrong! What's also interesting is the link (or lack of) in this article between fat intake and cholesterol levels.

It's also interesting that this article mentions the food industry and how it tried to capitalise on the the 'low-fat' advice by selling low fat foods loaded with sugars. The new craze seems to be the cholesterol lowering spreads / yoghurts. One point I've never been clear on with this is that low cholesterol is dangerous for pregnant women so if these products work so well - why are they still on the market?

See what you think:

hsph.harvard.edu/nutritions...

[Aliwally]

Thanks for this article. I took from it that it is the trans fats that are still the main culprits, but the other fats are better than refined carbohydrates in the diet.

When I was losing weight seriously I remember being told to avoid anything maufactured and labelled as "low fat" due to the really high sugar levels. It is just clever advertising as we all think low fat is good - end of story.

Have you read anything about the work of Ancel Keys which is where the original fat-heart disease hypothesis came from?

[Linda_Lincolnshire62]

Linda Lincolnshire.

Hi, I gave up butter and margarine altogether. If you buy really nice bread and put bananas or something you like on you hardly miss it. My Mum used to mix chopped dates and chopped apple up as a spread. Hope this helps, Linda.