Low fat diets can increase heart disease risk !

The low-fat diet just lost another huge trial, resulting in significantly more heart disease than a higher-fat Mediterranean diet. It lost badly enough that the trial was stopped in advance, as it was considered unethical to let the low-fat diet group continue to eat like that.

When I wrote about it yesterday I was criticized in the comments. Calling this study low fat was labeled “simply absurd and intellectualy inappropriate”. I disagree.

Above are the dietary guidelines for the low-fat group. It’s a regular low fat diet, like it’s been practiced and taught during the last few decades.

Is it a strict vegan-Ornish low-fat diet, that only a select few manage to actually eat long term? No. This is much worse. These are the common low-fat guidelines that hundreds of millions of people have been trying to follow for decades, as they’ve been told it would protect them from heart disease.

Unfortunately this is just the latest in a long line of studies proving that the regular low-fat diet is not only useless to people. It’s actually harmful.

More on this topic from the Diet Doctor here.

A meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, pooled together data from 21 unique studies that included almost 350,000 people, about 11,000 of whom developed cardiovascular disease (CVD), tracked for an average of 14 years, and concluded that there is no relationship between the intake of saturated fat and the incidence of heart disease or stroke.

Conclusions: A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat.

Link here.

Eddie