A Mistake Almost Everyone Makes About Fat

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

The fact that “dietary fat” makes many people think of “the fat hanging over my belt” is a linguistic tragedy.

In her indispensable book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, journalist Nina Teicholz says “fat” is an “unfortunate homonym.”

She is exactly right. Fat in food is distinct from fat around the waist, but the fact that the same term describes both leads to endless confusion.

It does not help that the National Institutes of Health is fully on board with this nonsense. As its website on obesity puts it, a “healthy eating plan” to lower obesity risk emphasizes low-fat foods, and “fat-free or low-fat dairy products” in particular.

This is simply wrong.

Following a groundbreaking 2010 study¹ exonerating saturated fat as a driver of heart disease, a new report provides one of best, clearest refutations of the idea that eating fat makes you fat.

It comes from an October 2015 analysis of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health, or ELSA-Brasil.²

It’s a big study, taking in 15,105 adults aged 35–74.

For this analysis, the authors excluded participants with known diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, or other chronic diseases and those who had extreme values of energy intake (in other words, chronic overeaters), leaving 9,835 relatively healthy adults to review.

The ELSA-Brasil participants all filled out a food consumption questionnaire. As I’ve said elsewhere, usually these “What did you eat in the last week?” surveys are notoriously unreliable.

But while most people can’t recall each specific food that they have consumed, it makes sense to me that many people can accurately recall if they typically eat full-fat, reduced-fat, or low-fat dairy products.

Personally, for example, I am dead certain I eat full-fat dairy products almost exclusively. I’d guess you are similarly confident you can accurately recall your habits in this realm.

Then, the researchers calculated what’s called a metabolic risk score, or MetScore, for each person in the study. This is a combination of vital health numbers including waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, HDL cholesterol, fasting triglycerides, and fasting glucose.

Result?

“We observed a graded inverse association for MetScore with total dairy… and full-fat dairy… but not with low-fat dairy intake.”

In other words, the more dairy products in general, and the more full-fat dairy products in particular, that these people consumed, the healthier their MetScore. This trend did not hold true for those who ate low-fat dairy products.

And a healthy MetScore represents everything we should all be shooting for: smaller waist, lower blood pressure, higher HDL (good) cholesterol, and lower fasting triglycerides and fasting glucose.

Bottom line: Dairy foods are not essential for health — an estimated 65 percent of the world’s population has some degree of lactose intolerance once they grow out of infancy. But if you enjoy and can easily digest dairy products, here are the three rules to follow:

1. Always buy organic.

2. Fermented dairy products, such as cheese, yogurt, and fermented “European style” butter may be more easily digested and offer greater nutrient density (such as increased folic acid levels). Live-culture yogurt, in particular, may also help support a healthy gut flora.

3. Always buy full-fat products.

The fact that eating fat can help keep obesity at bay is a concept that extends well beyond dairy products. Each time a person avoids consuming healthy, natural saturated fat — the kind found in meat, eggs, and coconut oil as well as dairy — he or she is likely to compensate by eating more carbohydrate.

And study³ after study⁴ has suggested that high consumption of carbohydrates, not fat, has driven the obesity epidemic that began in the early 1980s.

So don’t be taken in by the “unfortunate homonym.”

Assuming that you are already eating the recommended five–nine servings of fruits and vegetables daily, there is no healthier move you can make than to consume less flour, sugar, and unsaturated vegetable oil and more organic, grass-fed meat, eggs, and dairy.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Siri-tarino PW, Sun Q, Hu FB, Krauss RM. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010
2. Total and Full-Fat, but Not Low-Fat, Dairy Product Intakes are Inversely Associated with Metabolic Syndrome in Adults. J Nutr. 2015
3. Foster GD, Wyatt HR, Hill JO, et al. A randomized trial of a low-carbohydrate diet for obesity. N Engl J Med. 2003
4. A low-carbohydrate as compared with a low-fat diet in severe obesity. N Engl J Med. 2003