The ‘unhealthy’ foods I now wish I’d been eating for years

AT MEDICAL school in the 1980s we were taught that the main reason our patients were overweight and at risk of heart disease was because they were eating too much saturated fat (found in foods such as milk, cheese and butter).

One consultant told us ‘eating saturated fat will clog arteries as surely as pouring lard down a drain will clog the sink’.

There have since been a mass of studies undermining this message — and yet it’s still the advice you’re likely to hear from the HSE.

We also used to be told to avoid cholesterol-rich foods such as eggs and limit them to no more than once a week. Supermarkets were soon stacked to the rafters with ‘cholesterol-free’ foods.

Yet it turns out this was nonsense and the effect of the cholesterol we eat on the levels in our blood is very small.

In a recent study (presented at the American College of Cardiology conference), people who were asked to eat 12 eggs a week for four months showed no measurable changes in their cholesterol levels when compared to those who only ate two eggs a week or fewer.

And it seems the dangers of cholesterol have been seriously exaggerated. For a long time we were told that because eating saturated fat increases levels of ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol — which it does — then higher levels of LDL inevitably leads to heart disease. But that’s not true.

A study, published in BMJ Open last month, which looked at data from more than 170,000 middle-aged patients, found that those with higher-than-recommended LDL levels were actually at lower risk of dying from heart attacks than those whose LDL levels were at or below the recommended levels. This is something that has been discovered in other research.

Rather than LDL, a better predictor of mortality is the ratio of total cholesterol to your HDL score. In fact, we need cholesterol to make hormones such as oestrogen and testosterone; it’s also an essential part of your cell’s membranes.

So these days I eat eggs most mornings. I also happily eat butter, full-fat Greek yoghurt and full-fat milk. I cook with olive oil and eat lots of oily fish.

I only wish I could go back in time and advise my younger self that decades of eating low-fat foods would not offer me any protection in later life.