Survey findings offer real food for thought

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If you’ve spent years feeling guilty about eating red meat, butter and white bread, then hang your head no more – because it looks like everyone else was wrong after all. Of course this might be seen as a slightly lob-sided interpretation of new survey findings from the British Heart Foundation, but statistics are there to be interpreted in the way that best suits your argument.

So when a major study dismisses the link between fats and heart disease, it’s time to tuck into a big steak and chips.

And lather the butter onto the white bread as well, folks, because those who told us that margarine was your only man – that we had to replace our saturated fats with polyunsaturated spreads – don’t seem quite so sure anymore.

After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the British Heart Foundation study found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk.

Nor does eating polyunsaturated fat offer any greater heart protection.

Lead researcher Dr Rajiv Chowdhury did warn that replacing saturated fats with excess carbohydrates – such as white bread, white rice and potatoes – or with refined sugar and salts in processed foods, should be discouraged.

But hey, we hear what we want to.

And remember when they told us not to eat more than two eggs a week because they contained cholesterol? Then they admitted that cholesterol in eggs had almost no effect on blood cholesterol at all.

And there’s more – processed red meat that’s stiff with additives is to be avoided, but meat from free-range, grass-fed cattle is a rich source of conjugated linoleic acid, which reduces our risk of cancer, obesity, and diabetes.

Processed foods are loaded with salt to make them palatable – but there’s no evidence that salt added in judicious amounts in home cooking is a health problem.

One day, you read that red wine is deadlier than strychnine and the next, you’re told that a glass a day will help you live to be one hundred. So you think…‘if one glass equates to a century, how long would I live if I drank two of them?’

Indeed, a former World Health Organisation expert recently endeared himself to those who enjoy a bottle or three of wine by claiming that it isn’t bad to you after all – indeed, it turns out, a bottle a day is no harm at all.

And in a damming blow to the Pioneers, Dr Kari Poikolainen claimed that moderate drinking is better than abstaining – to the point that those who exceed recommended dose could live longer than teetotallers.

Now if that doesn’t result in a national day of celebration, nothing will – but his theory is that drinking only becomes harmful when people consume more than 13 units per day.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.