The FastDay Forum

[Debs]

Nor did I, but I fear mine may not be very popular either! C'est la vie

@@wendyjane I agree with you healthy green very necessary for our bodies. I crave greens so much I have turned to building a food garden so I can go out and pick my leafy greens and herbs every day and make a live salad brimming with goodness for my body. The leafy greens I buy from the supermarket are wilting in one day In a bag in the fridge in comparison they look dull and like they are loosing their goodness rapidly.

There is a place for fats obviously but it is now how we have them. I just relished my cauliflower au gratin in a creamy buttery béchamel (wheat free) with melted caramelised cheese combined it with a white bean Mediterranean tomato basil olive salad over leafy greens from garden. To follow a small bowl of freshly cut fruit salad. Feel like my cells are singing "oh happy days"

Thanks simcoeluv and ADFnFuel. I have only read the transcript so I cannot comment on the good doctor's personality or delivery. This is yet another summary of the case for saturated fats, there are many out there, and they all use very similar data so this doctor is not being controversial within the high-fat community, just spreading the message further.
Regarding fibre, there are several commentators in netland that think fibre and especially grains are actually damaging and that this is another topic where the message has been wrong for years.
Mark Sisson usually has a well-argued case for most things on his Daily Apple website and seems to be trustworthy.
I don't think your messenger was being shot, simcoeluv, merely chastised for not doing his homework better, which is why I always recommend Sisson and Peter Attia if you want to get to the heart of the matter. Pun intended!

hmm… i don't know about fibre being damaging. Perhaps certain types or fibre from certain sources, but isn't it the key to feeding healthy microbiota in our intestines?

see also: the-5-2-lab-f10/1973-insight-woody-allen-s-film-sleeper-t10795.html#p142035

As I was doing some brief stretches before my run just now, I was thinking about how "they" are so often wrong about things. After being told to do this for years, stretching before running is bad. Or perhaps I should say holding isometric stretches for too long before running increases the chance of injury. Why is so much received wisdom rubbish? Is the medical/sports/etc. community really that bad at understanding evidence? In some cases, new evidence changes views, but in so many cases, there was never any evidence for a particular view in the first place...

Is anyone able to summarise why eating sat fats is now good for you? I don't have an hour to give. Thanks in hope.

Sue

Sue: The quick summary is that they were never bad for you, all the research was faulty or distorted.

[carorees]

@soobidoobs I'll try!

Original scientific studies that appeared to show eating sat fat is bad were flawed because they were done in rabbits. Rabbits don't eat meat so have not evolved to process saturated fat. We do and have.
Studies in humans were also flawed. Most just showed that in countries where they eat a lot of fat there is also a lot of heart disease. This is known as an association (eating saturated fat is associated with heart disease), but association is not causation. If you look at the number of pubs and churches in towns across the UK, you'll find where there's more pubs there's also more churches - an association between the two - but no-one claims that pubs cause churches! They are associated because of another factor (the size of the town population). In the case of saturated fat, the countries chosen to be studied also have high sugar consumption, but fat was chosen as the baddie rather than sugar (due to industry pressure).
More recent, better designed, studies have failed to find that eating fat causes heart disease.
Moving on to cholesterol, as we learn more about cholesterol we are discovering that it is far, far more complicated than was first thought and that the measures of cholesterol we get from blood tests at the doctor's don't really tell us anything about heart disease risk. Cholesterol is a vital component of all our cells, it is only when it's deposited in the arteries that it causes a problem. No-one really knows exactly what causes this to happen but it is connected to inflammation not to fat intake. Many people think that it is carbohydrates that cause the inflammation so that having a diet high in carbs and fat is bad, but a diet high in fat but low in carbs is actually good for you.

HTH

Thank you CAROREES for explainingthe issue.
Your replies/comments/advices are always so full of knowledge, and you know how to make complecated issues more clear to ignorants like myself.
Appreciate your input in this excellent forum.
Thank you very very much indeed!

@AnnahMetuka Hello - I don't think I've said hello to you before! Just noticed your name and thought Metuka was perfect for a discussion about carbs/sugar?! Bet you're sweet enough

Thank you for posting this.

I was feeling ok with it but on Saturday night (foodie night) i had a good 25g (maybe 50g) of french butter.
Aldi Australia now stocks.... drum rolls

Le Conquerant butter ...delicious.

warning..

do not consume on a fast day but as the research shows, do not worry about eating it on non fast days (within reasonable quantities of course) as its 760 calories per 100g.

Very interesting talk (though he's not a very good speaker - reading his speech and misspeaking repeatedly). I've been continuing to eat a largely low fat diet through my 5:2 journey. It's so ingrained in me to avoid fat and especially sat fat. So I know now, more than ever, that I need to shift my diet in the direction of more fat, and have been telling hubs about it, so he won't be too shocked at me preparing higher fat meals . I might have to start following your blog more closely, @Fatdog!

Me, too @Wendyjane low fat all the way.
Just beginning to wake up and smell the bacon!

I'm the same - I have been so focussed on low fat for so many years it is difficult to change. I accept that fat makes food taste good at produces satiety. I just don't quite trust myself to stop eating in time if what I am eating is higher in calories than I am used to. I am starting to cook with a bit more fat using mainly coconut oil - just got to be brave!

Thank you Carorees:)

I don't think your messenger was being shot, simcoeluv, merely chastised for not doing his homework better, which is why I always recommend Sisson and Peter Attia if you want to get to the heart of the matter. Pun intended!

Thanks for your comments, Pete. I don't think the good doctor needs my help defending him or his message. I was just intrigued by the personal attack when I had not seen it before in many other posts. So I asked why, and the answer really was I believe in a low fat diet. My personal position is if you don't agree with the message, attack the message, not the messenger. Don't try to get people to not watch the clip, or undermine the information ahead of time based on undercutting the competency of the presenter. I have followed this guy for decades, and he knows exactly what he is talking about regardless of the quality of the presentation.

But that misses the point this thread brings up. What most of you don't know is that this guy was one of the national leaders in hoisting the low fat diet on the general public. Now that he is not leading a large well respected (rightfully) institution intent on getting government money for its research and has a safe, tenured job as a medical professor, he is speaking what he thinks.

This little clip reflects someone who was 'in power' and leading the charge, saying he was wrong and totally changing his position on a topic. Maybe he is as wrong now as he was before, but personally I think he got it right this time. Sometimes wisdom does come with age (and new or better research).

So for those of you brought up in the low fat era, realize one of your teachers (at least in the US) has recanted his opinion.

Now whether we can really get to a 70% cal. from fat level in our diets is another matter. The snack food industry will have to come up with more high fat snacks! But you have to understand, in the US, even the Med diet's 35% cal. from fat level had the government saying 'don't' because that level of fat in a diet is lethal. And when whole populations did not fall over dead, some people actually started trying to find out why. The rest, as they say, is history.

thanks, @carorees. Sorry to be lazy, I don't really have time to get a hold on the whole field, but do you have some recent well-conducted trials that conclude saturated fats are actually good? (as opposed to not being bad)

totally agree with your summation of the gentleman, @debs, I don't think he's doing this particular cause any favours by being associated with it - he can have his other causes and welcome!! But perhaps I'm just prejudiced against surgeons - generally not the sharpest tools in the shed outside their chopping. Apologies to any surgeons out there, I have just suffered under you guys for too long! Speaking of paranoid ideation...

And love the site, sciencebasedmedicine.org - very cool! Thanks debs!