According to a recent study, high fat foods such as cream, cheese and butter can protect you from heart disease.
Contrary to popular belief, eating a higher amount of naturally high fat foods, while simultaneously cutting down on the intake of carbohydrates does not raise cholesterol levels, according to researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway.
The study was led by Simon Dankel, who said that people: “can do perfectly well with fats as its main energy source.”
“People will say: ‘you can’t lose weight, you can’t go on any diets with saturated fats, no matter what’, but in this context, we see a very positive metabolic response. You can base your energy in your diet on either on carbohydrates or fat. It doesn’t make a big difference.”
NHS guidelines currently advise avoiding a diet high in saturated fats, believing that these can raise the level of cholesterol in the blood. Under the current guidelines, it is recommended that men should consume no more than 30g of saturated fat a day, and women no more than 20g.
The study involved 40 overweight men, of which half were given a strict low-fat, high-carb diet, while the others ate fewer carbohydrates but doubled their intake of saturated fats.
Dr Dankel said that they focussed primarily on fats from dairy, particularly butter which made up around 25 per cent of the high fat group’s energy consumption. Both groups consumed a large amount of vegetables, and neither exceeded 2100 calories per day.
By the end of the study, members of both groups had lost around 12kg on average and had very little change in their overall cholesterol levels.
Dr Dankel said the new research questioned “the alleged strong adverse effect of saturated fats on health, which hadn’t been tested as directly before”.
“It’s not the fat per se, or on its own, that’s driving a negative health response. You can have just as good a health benefit on this high-fat diet as a low-fat diet in this context,” he said.
‘Reduced fat’ foods have become increasingly popular over the last decade or so, however Dr Dankel claims that these foods had vastly increased sugar levels to make up for the lack of fats.
He said: many people would say this has been a major experiment to our diet. During this time we’ve had the most increase in obesity and related diseases.”
This news follows a recent Harvard study published in the British Medical Journal, that found that a high fat diet can lower the risk of heart disease by up to eight per cent.
