Red meat and dairy may be good for us: Page 2

Over the past 30 years, McLagan says, the move away from saturated fat has had no effect on lowering the incidence of cardiovascular disease. What happened instead, she says, is that people switched to margarine and spreads made from trans fats, which have since been found to be more harmful than saturated fats in causing diabetes and obesity. Our preference for vegetable oils has brought additional health issues. While fish oils are rich in heart-healthy omega-3 essential fatty acids, most vegetable oils, including sunflower and corn oil, are high in the much less beneficial omega-6, of which we already consume too much — the average UK diet has an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 1:10, whereas the recommended ratio is 1:3. “An excess of omega-6 has been linked to a range of killer diseases,” says McLagan. “Too much of it also inhibits our uptake of omega-3 from food.” And, after fish oils, what, according to McLagan, is one of the best food sources of omega-3? You guessed it: animal fat.

So what are we to do? Bridget Benelam, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, agrees that negotiating the fat maze is not easy. “It is really difficult to prove causal links between diet and disease,” she says. “It is accepted that there is enough evidence that excessive amounts of saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. But it is only one of the factors. We don’t need to avoid animal fat completely and there’s no reason why we can’t have moderate amounts of it in our diet.”

This is not a green light to gorge on bacon sarnies and fried bread. Too much fat will still make you put on weight, and Benelam stresses that, on average, our intake of saturated fat is one-fifth more than the upper limit set by the government. “Sometimes health messages get distorted and misinterpreted,” she says. “The truth is that nobody has ever said people should cut out animal fats completely. The aim should be to reduce overall fat intake to within healthy limits. Then you can enjoy a little butter on your toast.”

Face the Facts

The current UK health recommendation is to get no more than 35% of your total calorie intake from fat. No more than 11% of that total should be saturated fat derived from animals.
The recommended upper limit for women is a daily total of 70g of fat (20g of which can be saturated) and for men 95g (30g of which can be saturated).
Trying to determine fat content from food labels can be confusing. For instance, the terms ‘light’ and ‘lite’ have no legal definition and can actually refer to the colour of a food. For a food to be labelled ‘low fat’ it must contain no more than 3g of fat per 100g.
Learning to decipher fat figures yourself is the safest bet. According to the Food Standards Agency, a high-fat food contains 20g or more of total fat (5g of saturated fat) per 100g. Look instead for low-fat foods containing 3g of total fat (1.5g of saturated fat) or less.
‘Be wary of claims that a food is 90% fat free,’ says Louise Sutton, a dietician at Leeds Metropolitan University. ‘It does not mean it is a low-fat food because the remaining 10% of that product is fat. And in some cases, low-fat foods are high in sugar.’

Peta Bee From The Sunday Times