Regina Wilshire brings us another study analysis. Unlike the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial conducted on post-menopausal women that failed to correlate fat to health problems (published in the Journal of the American Medical Association), this one was conducted on 86 men aged 22-64. The abstract can be found here at PudMed. The full article is linked from that page at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, but it costs to subscribe.
Why do people still cling to low-fat diets as healthy when study after study is showing the opposite? The two I've mentioned here aren't the only ones. Ms. Wilshire has another study she wrote about recently. This one was conducted in April, 2004 on healthy but sedentary men and women (abstract here). In this study the participants were placed either on a diet consisting of 19% fat or 50% fat. The high-fat group did better, with HDL (good) cholesterol going up and no increase in heart risk factors. The researchers conclusions was telling:
CONCLUSION: A low fat diet (19%) may not provide sufficient calories, essential fatty acids, and some micronutrients (especially vitamin E and zinc) for healthy untrained individuals, and it also lowered ApoA1 and HDL-C. Increasing fat intake to 50% of calories improved nutritional status, and did not negatively affect certain cardiovascular risk factors.
Fat is not the enemy. Carbohydrates (especially processed and starchy ones) are the enemy. Humankind survived quite well as hunter-gatherers before the advent of agriculture a mere 10,000 years ago. As hunter-gatherers our diet was high in fat and protein. God meant it to be this way and set up our digestive systems to work best on this kind of diet.
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