Dr Michael Mosley an honest man not afraid to admit he was wrong !

Milk, cheese, butter, cream - in fact all saturated fats - are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago.

During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds.

Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I've been dishing out about fat.

New studies have not only failed to find a convincing link between saturated fat and heart disease, they have shattered other long-held anti-fat beliefs, too.

We now have compelling evidence that low-fat diets rarely work and that eating the right kind of fat is not only good for your heart but may also help you lose weight.

So why the sudden change? And what is making us fat?

The roots of our current confusion lie in a paper by an American scientist called Ancel Keys in 1953. It covered the increasingly common problem of clogged arteries.

Keys included a simple graph comparing fat consumption and deaths from heart disease in men from six different countries. Americans, who ate a lot of fat, were far more likely to have a heart attack than the Japanese, who ate little fat. Case solved. Or was it?

Other scientists began wondering why Keys chose to focus on just six countries when he had access to data for 22. If places like France and Germany were included the link between heart disease and fat consumption became much weaker. These were, after all, countries with high fat consumption, but relatively modest rates of heart disease.

So some fats are good for us, but surely saturated fats are bad?

Even this has been undermined by a study funded by the British Heart Foundation and published this year. Based on 72 previous studies the researchers found no evidence that saturated fats cause heart disease.

This isn't a licence to pour cream down your throat, because even if saturated fats don't directly harm the heart, too many calories will.

Personally, I try not to have biscuits and cakes in our house as I know I can't resist them. But I have gone back to butter, Greek yoghurt and semi-skimmed milk. I eat more oily fish, eggs and the odd burger.

After all those years believing them the enemy, saturated fats taste more delicious than ever.

More on this article here.

Eddie