Terrible advice from a cardiology registrar made headlines on the BBC News today who titled the piece: Saturated fat heart disease ‘myth’.
Clearly this doctor has never heard of The China Study, the biggest study of it’s kind conducted by an ‘A’ list of the best researchers in the world headed by Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University, T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University and Chen Junshi, Deputy Director of Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene at the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, and Li Junyao of the China Cancer Institute.
This study equated to the equivalent of 800+ years of professional and technical labour, a study of such scale it has never been equalled.
Saturated fat – also known as fat from animal sources – was first proven in The China Study (and in many studies since) to increase the risk of heart attack, heart disease, arteriosclerosis, cancer and diabetes as well as other diseases. Keeping your intake of it low is the best thing you can do and that’s no myth, it’s fully documented science.
Dr Aseem Malhotra’s work is simply an opinion piece. There aren’t any facts or studies behind it, it’s just his thoughts.
The British Heart Foundation said there was conflicting evidence and quite rightly so – there’s the biggest nutritional science study in the entire history of mankind!
It’s not clear whether the BBC are simply troll baiting for extra readers or are specifically trying to highlight how dangerously ignorant some people with the title of doctor still can be, but their giving airtime to this isdeterimental to public health. There’s enough confusion amongst the public as-is since lots of opinion by seemingly respected figures are paraded around but little air time is given to the real research and statistics that have been built up over long periods of time.
The media are unlikely to give a good perspective and doctors – as this piece clearly shows – often don’t know the facts themselves. It’s worth educating yourself.