Butter, cheese, eggs not bad for heart

26 Oct Real news

A cardiologist of Indian origin in the UK has spun conventional medical wisdom around by showing that fatty food like butter, cheese, eggs and yoghurt can be good for the heart.

Cardiologist Aseem Malhotra published his findings on Wednesday in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) saying that the medical advice of cutting down on saturated fats to reduce the risk of heart disease may be wrong.

He said that recent studies "have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and risk of cardiovascular disease".Malhotra is an interventional cardiology specialist and registrar at Croydon University Hospital in London says scientific evidence shows that advice to reduce saturated fat intake "has paradoxically increased our cardiovascular risks."

He says the government's obsession with levels of total cholesterol "has led to the over-medication of millions of people with statins and has diverted our attention from the more egregious risk factor of atherogenic dyslipidaemia" (an unfavourable ratio of blood fats).

Saturated fat has been demonized since the 1970s when a landmark study concluded that there was a correlation between incidence of coronary heart disease and total cholesterol which was then correlated with the percentage of calories provided by saturated fat, Malhotra said."But correlation is not causation," he said. But patients were advised to "reduce fat intake to 30% of total energy and a fall in saturated fat intake to 10%". One of the earliest obesity experiments published in the Lancet in 1956 compared groups consuming diets of 90% fat versus 90% protein versus 90% carbohydrate and revealed that the greatest weight loss was in the fat consuming group.

More recently, a study revealed that a "low fat" diet showed the greatest decrease in energy expenditure an unhealthy lipid pattern and increased insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes) compared with a low carbohydrate and low glycaemic index diet.

Malhotra pointed to the United States where percentage of calorie consumption from fat has declined from 40% to 30% in the past 30 years (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same) but obesity has rocketed.

One reason, he said, is that the food industry "compensated by replacing saturated fat with added sugar." Adopting a Mediterranean diet after a heart attack is almost three times as powerful in reducing mortality as taking a statin, writes Malhotra."Doctors need to embrace prevention as well as treatment. The greatest improvements in morbidity and mortality have been due not to personal responsibility but rather to public health... It is time to bust the myth of the role of saturated in heart disease and dietary advice that has contributed to obesity," he said.

Commenting on the study, the chair of Britain's National Obesity Forum David Haslam said, "It's extremely naive of the public and the medical profession to imagine that a calorie of bread, a calorie of meat and a calorie of alcohol are all dealt in the same way by the amazingly complex systems of the body.