Message to eat fat ‘unhelpful’
Calls for official food guidelines to encourage people to eat fat are irresponsible, a New Zealand obesity expert says.
The calls were made in a report by UK health groups the National Obesity Forum and Public Health Collaboration, claiming food guidelines were incorrect.
They said official guidelines denouncing saturated fat have had ‘‘disastrous health consequences’’ and the public should, in fact, be told to eat fat and that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.
National guidelines should tell people to avoid ‘‘low fat’’; ‘‘proven to lower cholesterol foods’’ and high omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable oils; to stop counting calories and reduce starchy and refined carbohydrates to reverse type 2 diabetes, the report said.
The group said faulty guidelines were responsible for the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
New Zealand obesity expert Professor Boyd Swinburn said claims in the report were extremely unhelpful.
There were a number of studies linking saturated fat with changes in cholesterol and all the dietary and drug research on dietary cholesterol pointed to an important effect on heart disease.
‘‘To toss out all of that evidence and just blatantly say just eat as much fat as you want is irresponsible and not reflective of the totality of the evidence.’’
He said the report was playing up points of difference among health professionals to the extreme.
‘‘In fact, there is a lot of agreement about the standard messages in the standard dietary guidelines which have evolved over time.
‘‘They’re not static, they’re not perfect, they’re not the last word on nutrition but they are arrived at with very careful consideration of the literature and dietary modelling and a whole lot of things.’’
Eating and Activity Guidelines produced by the Ministry of Health were last updated in November last year and there were no plans to change them, principal adviser public health Dr Harriette Carr said.
The guidelines were based on international evidence reviews, reports and guidelines but were not set in stone, she said. ‘‘Nutrition and physical activity science is always evolving and the Ministry of Health
‘‘To say just eat as much fat as you want is irresponsible.’’ Professor Boyd Swinburn
continues to monitor findings from worldwide research.’’
Dr Caryn Zinn and Professor Grant Schofield, from Auckland University of Technology, are among 16 international experts to throw their weight behind the UK report.
Zinn said many health professionals and academics believed current guidelines were not working – ‘‘we’re getting fatter and sicker’’.
The big areas needing change were recommendations about fats and carbohydrates, which she said guided people ‘‘to eat pasta and rice and carbohydrate-based food’’.
‘‘When you eat a lot of carbs and not much fat you tend to be in a constant state of hunger, blood sugar fluctuations, and that does not bode well for prevention of chronic disease.’’