Red meat and dairy may be good for us

In a new book, Jennifer McLagan questions scientific basis for the low-fat diet and opens up our menus

Fat finds itself in and out of fashion more frequently than flares and leggings. One minute we are being urged to avoid it and told that very low-fat diets are the way to go; the next we are encouraged to gorge on it, Atkins-style. Throughout fat’s fluctuating popularity, there has been one constant: that saturated animal fats are bad, bad, bad for the heart and we consume too much of them at our peril. But is even this accepted wisdom a big fat lie? That is the case argued in a controversial new book by a leading Canadian chef and food expert. She suggests that saturated fat’s killer reputation is wholly undeserved.

meat-dairy In Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, Jennifer McLagan not only questions the scientific basis for a low-fat diet, but argues that many of our health woes have arisen from our attempts in recent years to cut down on butter, lard, suet and other saturated animal fats. She argues we should be eating more, not less, of them. “You can’t live without fat,” she says. “It gives us energy and boosts the immune system. Some fats have antimicrobial properties, others lower bad cholesterol. Your brain is made of fat and cholesterol, as are the membranes of your cells.”

McLagan claims that much of the bad rap surrounding saturated fat stems from flawed studies that were carried out between the 1950s and 1970s, mostly by the American physiologist Ancel Keys. It was Keys who first came up with what is known as the diet-heart hypothesis, after some of his research showed that a high intake of animal fat not only raised cholesterol levels but was strongly linked to heart attacks. His findings prompted medical experts around the world to change dietary recommendations to those that are still heavily promoted today: in short, cut down on animal fats for the sake of your heart.

Certainly, it is almost impossible to find nutrition health campaigns that advocate eating more animal fat. Even those behind the Atkins diet, who once encouraged followers to eat fatty foods, are now promoting a toned-down plan, with more lean meat and fish than sausages, cheese and bacon. Recent research into what has been dubbed the “eco-Atkins” approach at the University of Toronto showed that a low-carbohydrate diet in which animal protein was replaced by vegetable sources, such as soy, wheat (gluten) and nuts, not only reduced weight but lowered blood pressure and cholesterol more effectively than other diets. “We took out the saturated fat and cholesterol and put in vegetarian protein sources,” says Dr David Jenkins, a professor of nutritional sciences, who led the research. “We know that nuts lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease, and soy is eaten in the Far East, where they don’t get much heart disease. So these foods can be put together as protein and fat sources.”

However, there are many who remain sceptical about fat’s role in heart disease, claiming that gaping holes existed in the research that led to saturated fats being branded a killer. In one of his landmark studies, for instance, Keys looked at animal-fat consumption in seven countries. Although he found a high intake was a strongly linked to heart disease, the data wasn’t rock solid, and in three of the countries studied there was no clear link. Other researchers have failed to show animal fat is as harmful as we are led to believe. In one of the largest government-funded research programmes in America, the Women’s Health Initiative study, carried out at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in 2006, a diet low in total fat and saturated fat was shown to have no impact in reducing heart disease among nearly 49,000 women who took part.

Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council’s human nutrition research department in Cambridge, says that saturated fat does have an undeservedly poor reputation. “There are different forms of saturated fat, and the fat in red meat, for example, is a form called stearic acid, which isn’t linked to heart disease,” she says. “Other forms, such as the fat in butter, have a much stronger association, and, of course, too much of any fat will result in obesity, which is itself a risk factor for heart disease.” Such confusion, McLagan says, means that “nobody has ever been able to prove the supposed link between a diet high in animal fat and cardiovascular disease, and that’s why we have people such as the Inuit, who eat a lot of animal fat and who do not have high rates of heart disease”.