It’s rare these days to find someone who doesn’t have a friend, family member or perhaps even themselves who’s affected by heart disease. The chances are, too, they’ve been warned off ‘bad foods’ like saturated fats and all foods containing them, while encouraged to use manufactured cholesterol-lowering margarines, yoghurts and dressings. Do these tactics bring the impressive improvements being sought? Well, unfortunately, not always.
As I’ve suspected for some time, the body can recognise ‘real food’ from fifty paces. Having had the whole of our evolutionary timescale to become accustomed to the merits of this seed, that fish, those berries, it can assimilate and utilise real food very readily. Take, on the other hand a margarine, made from inferior quality oils, which has been heat treated to exceptionally high temperatures, deodorised, hydrogenated and refrigerated, with some sterols added at the end to ‘help lower cholesterol’. Indeed plant sterols do lower bad cholesterol, so eat plants which contain them naturally, beans, for example, rather than adding margarine to your diet. Not alone are beans so much more versatile, a dish of beans with fresh herbs, garlic and a good glug of extra virgin olive oil strikes me as a lot more appetising than an equivalent bowl of margarine. Functional foods should be delicious too.
So what about the heavy duty saturated fats, from meat, butter, coconut oil and so on? Well, apart from winning on the flavour front, fats are essential for digestion. Yes, cheaper cuts of meat are higher in fats. But cooked for longer, those fats help break down the complex protein structure of the meat for better absorption. Then there are the fat-soluble vitamins in our food, which remain locked in there if eaten without the appropriate fats. The same applies to eggs. The perfect ‘pre-packed’ food, why anyone would eat one half without the other is beyond me. A healthy egg from a healthy hen has the perfect combination of essential fatty acids, lecithin, protein and cholesterol. Start leaving bits out and the perfect balance is gone.
Then there’s butter, is it not an isolated product itself, separated from whole milk? Yes it is, which makes it quite concentrated and suggests you need very little. Ideally of course, if you are going to drink milk, it would be with the butterfat still in there to digest the protein and absorb the calcium. It’s so difficult to get good quality milk though, full fat or otherwise, it would be safer to have a bowl of quinoa drizzled with ghee or macadamia oil. All the protein, fats and calcium without the hormones or antibiotics. But back to butter. How is it that, decades ago, when America caught on to the craze of low fat or no fat foods, obesity levels started to rise dramatically? Well, those nutrients which rely on fats to be absorbed, were suddenly inaccessible. Then, there was the whole tract of foods which contained next to no nutrients to begin with, like highly addictive corn syrup-sweetened snacks and overly salted crisps and fries. Add in a lack of awareness in the process of eating and you can see how the body, in search of elusive nutrients, keeps sending signals for more food. The mouth feel of fats has played a role in our diet for centuries and near complete elimination of fats can all but cause the digestive system to grind to a halt. A new potato served with butter not only tastes better but is much easier to digest. Half butter, half flax or olive oil is even better.
You’re probably scratching your head, wondering,’ don’t you always say animal fats are bad?’. Yes and no. We’ve become far too accustomed to cheap foods and so are very reluctant to spend money on expensive free range, rarebreed or organic meats. I would argue that if the majority of your diet was made up of naturally heart-friendly foods, like vegetables, fruit, nuts, oily fish, oats, quinoa, spelt and fresh herbs, which are relatively cheap, then you can afford, economically and nutritionally, to have very good meat once or twice a week. Likewise with dairy. If you do eat it, buy organic milk and butter and artisan cheese, and savour them. When you bake, by all means use butter and eggs. It’s unlikely you bake every single day. If, on the other hand, you buy supermarket cakes and biscuits laden with trans-fats, that’s where you run into difficulty. Once your emphasis is on real food, combined with moderation in your approach, you can’t go too far wrong. Add in physical exercise, personal fulfilment, spiritual enrichment, a good social network (I don’t mean facebook), and the ability to laugh and you start to appreciate that heart disease has as much to do with an unwell society as what’s on you plate. A trial conducted a few years ago looked at 28,000 middle aged men and women in Sweden, searching for links between fats and mortality from heart disease and all other causes.’ No deteriorating effects of high saturated fat intake were observed for either sex.’ Probably worrying about the perceived risks of eating saturated fats does your heart more harm than the fat itself. Just exercise common sense. Saturated fats deliver intense flavour and so use just a little if you do fancy them.
A key aspect of heart disease appears to occur when plaques develop in the arteries, which are a result of oxidation, due to free radicals. So anything which increases your toxic load, or interferes with your ability to manage it, is of more concern than fats per se. Smoking, street drugs, alcohol, lack of exercise, artificial sweeteners, chemical-laden household products and cosmetics, trans fats, hydrogenated fats and of course stress, should be top of your list of areas to improve. That way you’ll see for yourself that fats shouldn’t always be vilified and can play a role in a healthy diet.
