‘Health-aiding’ high-fat diet is a sweet pill for new converts
• Proponents say participants have experienced a range of health benefits, including improvements in blood pressure, diabetes and weight control
Fat is good for you and calorie counting is a waste of time.” Stephanie Moore, head of nutrition at Grayshott Spa, in the heart of London’s commuter belt, is speaking to a room of 20 people mainly dressed in bathrobes; I am one of them.
We are five days into a dramatically different eating regimen, and several hours into a session of being bombarded with information that runs counter to the received wisdom about diet that we have been given all our lives.
The regimen itself is relatively simple. It comprises mainly a week of “healing the gut” by eliminating sugar, dairy, wheat, caffeine and alcohol and eating more fermented food such as sauerkraut, followed by a longterm change in eating habits to cut out sugar and refined carbohydrates such as white rice, breakfast cereal and pasta.
Yoghurt, kefir and kimchi are all advocated, for being beneficial to the microbiome, or bacteria in your gut, as is intermittent fasting. But key elements of the advice are more surprising. Central is the need to eat lots of good-quality animal protein and fat — including double cream and red meat. Crucially, such a diet should not involve a lifetime of denial. Sleeping is seen as more important than exercise.
Originally devised to improve digestive health, Grayshott’s programme — now in its fourth year — turned out to have other beneficial sideeffects, says Moore.
In the first year, after following it for several weeks, the energy levels of patients went up, their blood pressure came down, and they were able to reduce medication for hypertension or diabetes. Their arthritis improved, as did levels of good cholesterol.
Many participants lost substantial amounts of weight.
The results have turned the therapists here into evangelical proponents of this way of eating. They believe it could help keep some of the diseases of modern civilisation — type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, even Alzheimer’s — at bay.
“Type 2 diabetes has become so prevalent, it’s become almost normal,” says Moore. “We have got used to the idea of a disease which kills us but which we can avoid just by eating differently.”
So why is everyone not eating this way? The Grayshott programme is part of a growing global health movement that argues much of the dietary advice given by governments and nutritionists for the past 50 years is wrong; that low-fat food is bad, while reducing calories does not result in sustainable weight loss.
For Moore, this message has done untold damage. As we struggle with endless fad diets, people in the West are getting fatter, and the obesity crisis has spawned a surge in lifestylerelated diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
The arguments are backed up by people’s everyday experience of trying — and failing — to lose weight, says Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology and director of the TwinsUK Registry, established to study age-related diseases at King’s College London.
“Dietary advice tells us to eat less fat, less sugar or less protein and yet most diets fail in the long term,” he says.
For Spector, another “myth” that needs exploding is the fear of saturated fats — used in milk, cream and some cheeses. “If eating saturated fat is so bad, why do the French, who every day eat much more of it than the Anglo-Saxons, suffer from less than a third the rate of heart disease of Brits?” he says.
According to Spector and others, low-fat products often replace fat with sugar, thereby contributing to a vicious circle of weight gain and ill-health.
The recognition that sugar consumption must be reduced has been gaining ground in scientific and official circles. The World Health Organisation recommends that sugar consumption be limited to less than a tenth of daily energy intake. But for Spector, “it’s not just about sugar and fat, it’s about our whole attitude to eating”.
Some of the advice during the week-long health regime proves difficult to digest. Avoiding fruit but eating butter goes against everything we have been taught. Undoing years of habits is hard. Until the middle of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom was that bread, pasta, potatoes, sweets and alcohol were fattening, and that the best way to lose weight was to cut them out. But research in the 1960s and 70s seemed to demonstrate a clear link between eating fat, particularly saturated fat, and heart disease, and between calorie-control and weight-loss.
Since then, limiting calories and reducing fat-consumption have been the official lines the public has been fed by governments in the West. It remains the view of many mainstream scientists and nutritionists. In the UK, the National Health System website advises that meals should be based on potatoes, bread, rice, pasta or other carbohydrates and urges the public to “go for lower-fat and lowersugar products where possible, such as 1% fat milk, reduced-fat cheese or plain low-fat yoghurt”. Foods high in fat should be eaten “less often and in small amounts”, it urges.
In the US until only recently, the Department of Agriculture’s food guide pyramid put fats at the top of the pyramid, to be used “sparingly”, and bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the bottom, with a recommendation to eat between six and 11 servings of these daily. Its current recommendations are based on a plate divided between the different food groups that suggests “grains” should make up more than a quarter of food intake.
In the UK, the government and its health advice arm, Public Health England, are advised by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition. The committee published a report into carbohydrates and sugar in July 2015 that suggested “free” sugars (sugars added to food as well as those naturally occurring) should be kept to 5% of daily energy intake, but said the public should be advised to make up half its total dietary energy intake from carbohydrates.
There was “no association”, the report found, between sugar and type 2 diabetes, “no association” between sugar and heart attacks, “no association” between sugary drinks and obesity, and, for children and adolescents, “no association between total carbohydrate intake and … body fatness”.
Public Health England describes the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition as an independent body that reviews the totality of evidence, deciding whether there have been enough significant studies to indicate change.
“Official advice doesn’t change that frequently,” a spokeswoman said.
After its findings were published, the chairman of the committee, Prof Ian MacDonald, was accused of being “in bed with the food industry”. MacDonald hit back, saying: “I do not provide a mouthpiece for anyone. I am nobody’s mouthpiece other than my own (and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition’s), and that’s after I’ve carefully reviewed the science behind an opinion.”
MacDonald, like many of his colleagues in the academic community, has received funding from big food companies such as Unilever, which have poured millions into creating products based on the official advice to reduce fat. Changing the advice risks upsetting many vested interests and would have repercussions throughout the academic community.
US science writer Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar, believes there is a direct correlation between the food industry’s agenda, official eating advice and the rise in obesity, as well as an increase in obesity-related diseases. “The fear of fat — saturated, in particular — is based on the state of the science in the 1960s and 1970s, and it simply doesn’t hold up in the light of more recent research and the state of the science today,” he writes.
It is no wonder that the public is confused. “Just remember all that fruit juice we poured down the kids when they were little,” says Dr Alice Leahy. “We thought it was doing them so much good.”
Leahy believes childhood obesity is having a damaging effect on the health of children’s joints, and has established a clinic at Southampton Hospital, England, that treats noninflammatory joint problems in children and adults.
“I still regularly hear from patients that fat is the baddie, and the advice people are getting is, ‘You need plenty of carbohydrates’,” she says. “I see a lot of children who have joint problems made worse by their obesity. They all say, ‘We’re trying really hard’, but they’re eating low-fat foods, which tend to contain a lot of sugar, and drinking fruit juice. In the current context of what the official advice on diet is, it’s very difficult and confusing for people to hear another message.”
She now recommends to her patients a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, and says patients at the hospital have seen their symptoms improve drastically, or their type 2 diabetes “switched off” after following the advice. “The official advice out there feels criminal, just wrong and, as a paediatrician, I feel complicit,” she says.
“We have to reassure people that they don’t need to feel guilty for eating fat, but the belief that we should eat low-fat, high-carb is very deeply entrenched.”
WE HAVE GOT USED TO THE IDEA OF A DISEASE THAT KILLS US BUT THAT WE CAN AVOID JUST BY EATING DIFFERENTLY JUST REMEMBER ALL THAT FRUIT JUICE WE POURED DOWN THE KIDS. WE THOUGHT IT WAS DOING THEM SO MUCH GOOD