Graham Harvey highlights the popular nutritionists mantra that saturated fats cause heart disease despite the fact there's plenty of evidence out there that the theory is based on spurious science and selective results. Are we being fed entirely the wrong message about healthy eating...?

"What makes a healthy food? If you go by the popular media there’s a different answer almost every week. Today it’s a new super-food guaranteed to prolong your life and fill you with youthful vigour. Tomorrow they’re likely to be warning of some gastronomic booby trap that’s about to cut you down in your prime.

Fortunately the reality is a little more predictable. For the most part healthy foods are what you might call the traditional foods of a well-farmed countryside. The sort of foods our great grand-parents thrived on – vegetables and salad crops grown on fertile, biologically-healthy soils; meat and dairy foods from animals grazing clover-rich pastures.

These are the foods that’ll shrink the NHS budget; the foods that have sustained human beings for thousands of years. There’s no magic about them. No great scientific breakthroughs are required for them to be produced in abundance. We have the soils and the necessary technology. We could start turning them out next week if we chose.

Yet foods like this are hard to find. As a result we suffer from a catalogue of dire conditions – from obesity to heart disease and cancer by way of diabetes and chronic fatigue. Even after the credit crunch we remain one of the most affluent societies in human history. Yet we are among the worst nourished.

The reason we seem so bent on self-destruction are complex. But at the heart of it there’s a shocking fact. The so-called experts on diet and disease are wedded to a theory that’s giving the rest of us precisely the wrong message about healthy eating.

I’m talking about the near universal mantra of health campaigners that saturated fat causes heart disease. It never did and it doesn’t now. And you don’t have to take my word for it. There’s plenty of evidence out there that the theory is based on spurious science and selective results.

The best appraisal I’ve seen recently is in Gary Taubes’s The Diet Delusion (Vermilion) but there are plenty of others around.

In Taubes’s view, the true cause of the co-called diseases of civilization are carbohydrates, particularly of the processed kind like sugar, white flour and high-fructose corn syrup, the secret additive that turns up in thousands of processed foods and drinks. Our high carb diets flood our systems with insulin, the hormone that regulates the whole hormonal balance of the body. Since insulin controls fat storage, we end up accumulating too much fat tissue.

Through their effects on insulin, high carbohydrate diets lead to diabetes, heart disease and a host of other degenerative conditions, says Taubes.
An alternative theory is that today’s most damaging diseases are caused by a change in the composition of fats in our diet. Among the essential fats our bodies need – and which they can’t make for themselves – are omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids. Modern western diets with their high intakes of cereals in the form of pastries, cakes, biscuits and pasta, provide too many omega-6 fats and too few omega-3s.

Omega 3s form part of the cell membrane of every cell in the body. They play a key role in the transfer of nutrients into cells, and are transformed into messaging agents known as cytokines which affect the behaviour of cells. When omega-3s and omega-6s are out of balance, as they are in grain-rich western diets, the body becomes vulnerable to many degenerative diseases including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Despite this government health experts continue to spread the outdated notion that saturated fats are to blame. Earlier this year the Food Standards Agency launched a campaign aimed at persuading people to reduce their intake of saturated fat – by replacing butter with a vegetable oil spread, for example. The powerful margarine industry quickly got behind the campaign with ads portraying their own yellow spreads as the true source of healthy fats.
We’re now in the bizarre situation where the wholesome, natural foods human beings have eaten for thousands of years are presented as dangerous, while the fabricated products of food factories are promoted as “healthy”. Let’s not forget that for the best part of a century the margarine industry sold us deadly hydrogenated fats with the claim that their products were “healthy”.

The truth is that saturated fats are not only good for us – they are essential to our well-being. Animal foods such as meat and dairy products can be major contributors to human health. What matters is the way they’re produced on the farm.

The good news is that whatever disease theory turns out to be the right one, whole foods fresh from British farms are likely to be the answer. But our farms are going to have to do a very different job than they do today.

In a recent edition of The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4 the presenter looked at lamb from a farm in Wiltshire. A well-known butcher supplying meat to some of Britain’s finest restaurants claimed that this was the best-flavoured lamb he’d ever tasted. Then a food scientist reported that this particular lamb contained unusually high levels of health-protecting nutrients such as vitamin E and other antioxidants, along with omega-3 fatty acids.

For me the most interesting part of the story was how this tasty, healthy lamb was produced. It didn’t come from a modern breed grazing on highly-fertilised grass like most lamb today. The flock itself was of a very primitive breed called the Manx Loghtan, and the lambs were reared on traditional, herb rich Wiltshire grasslands.
The evidence is now strong that beef and lamb produced by animals grazing traditional pastures is rich in the substances that protect us from disease. The same is true of milk and dairy foods. Sadly a lot of meat and milk is produced from animals – not grazing grass – but feeding on cereal grains, maize and soya. Foods produced this way have lost many of the nutrients that once made them healthy.

The cause of this degradation of everyday foods is the change that has taken place in British agriculture. In our grand-parents time farmers were mainly engaged in producing healthy foods for the people of this island. Today their main interest is in growing industrial-scale commodities – particularly wheat – for sale on global markets.

Thanks to farm subsidies they grow far too much wheat - even more than we need to feed our craving for cakes, pastries and pasta. As a result large amounts are fed to animals, including ruminants whose natural food is grass. Many UK dairy cows are fed as much as 3 tonnes of high-energy grains each year, an over-rich diet which is unhealthy for them and unhealthy for the people who eat the products of their milk.

Fortunately there are healthy, pasture-fed foods around like that Wiltshire lamb. If we’re going to protects ourselves from today’s most worrying diseases we need to make sure we’re eating the milk and dairy foods of animals grazing fresh pasture, preferably pasture with clovers and deep-rooting herbs. My favourite cheese – the incomparable Comte from the French Jura region – is made in just this way.

Pasture-fed beef and lamb is relatively easy to find, particularly if you’re able to buy at farmers’ markets. Milk and dairy foods can be more problematical, though of course there’s Anchor butter from New Zealand, the only genuinely grass-fed butter I’ve found. However, an increasing number of UK dairy farmers are now going down the route of producing milk from grass, so it surely won’t be long before the “pasture fed” label starts appearing on a bigger range of foods.
Until then it’s worth making the extra effort. If you want to stay healthy forget government messages about saturated fats being bad for you. Just make sure the fats you eat are from animals that grazed clover-rich pastures as nature intended."

Graham Harvey’s new book The Carbon Fields is available from grassrootsfood.com. His book We Want Real Food is published by Constable.

Real Food recommendation - Both these books are required reading for anyone who has an interest in where their food comes from, its taste and it's health-giving properties. Graham Harvey is promoting a common sense but practical solution that needs to be heard by everyone, particularly those of us concerned with the sustainability and resilience of our current food systems. His Opinion Piece is piercing in its analysis and quite damming because the current momentum of food and nutritional advice is almost certainly doing significant damage to the health of the developed world.