Been down to the Med lately? If you have, you’ll have noticed that the locals don’t eat the Mediterranean diet – or certainly not the idealized version celebrated by medical researchers. Yet, they’ve been urging us to eat oily fish, fresh vegetables and fruit, with lashings of olive oil, all rounded off by a plate of nuts – just like the Mediterraneans do.
Except they don’t. Instead, they eat plenty of red meat, eggs, and dairy products like cheese, cream, butter and milk, and they love white processed bread – whether they’re baguettes, croissants or the Italian panini (grilled sandwich). Or, as food and obesity researcher Dr Zoí Harcombe put it, äóìIf it moves, they eat it + white things.äó
The thinking behind the idealized Mediterranean diet – or ‘FMD’ (‘fictitious Mediterranean diet’), as Harcombe describes it – is that eating too much saturated fat from red meat raises cholesterol levels, which then block our arteries and cause heart disease.
It’s a theory that’s had an interesting history. It all started at around the turn of the 20th century when two Russian pathologists noticed that the cholesterol levels in rabbits rose when they were fed animal meat. The fact that rabbits are herbivores and that meat is an alien food to them didn’t seem to trouble the pair overly much.
Their strange paper gathered dust for years until a young researcher from the University of Minnesota stumbled upon it, and thought it might explain the epidemic of heart disease that had started to sweep across the US after the Second World War.
The researcher, Dr Ancel Keys, struck an early blow on behalf of the saturated fats theory when he produced a striking graph that showed a strong connection between deaths from coronary disease and the amount of fats the patients had consumed. The graph was based on data that Keys had collated from seven countries – the starting point for his famed Seven Countries Study.
But he omitted to mention that he had, in fact, been monitoring 22 countries. When the data from the missing 15 countries were included, the association between saturated fats and heart disease disappeared.
That’s not so surprising. Countless reviews have established that the foods that contain cholesterol – meat, fish, eggs and dairy – don’t alter cholesterol levels. This finding has also been seen in studies of indigenous peoples whose diets are rich in animal fats and, yet, have very few cases of heart disease.
Keys also appears to have got his food groups mixed up too, as Harcombe points out in a new book she’s written (along with 20 other authors).1 For one, he classified cakes and ice cream as fats when they’re mostly carbohydrates. But his biggest error – and the one on which his entire theory stands – is in believing that animal fats are saturated while fats from plant foods like vegetables are unsaturated. In fact, says Harcombe, every fat-containing food comprises all three types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated.
But unaware of such niceties, Keys criticized the natives of one region of Italy for eating butter, cream, meat and eggs, which are äóìloaded with saturated fatty acids and cholesteroläó. But he was wrong again: a sirloin steak is just 2 per cent saturated fat, while the 10 g of fat in 100 g of egg is 37 per cent saturated fat – or 3.7 per cent of the egg.
Moving east from Italy, Keys praised the people living in the Croatian region of Dalmatia, where the locals consumed vast amounts of olive oil instead of animal fats, while excoriating the people of Slovenia for eating too much animal fat – especially pork fat – instead of the healthy oils.
But he either didn’t know or just didn’t mention that 1 Tbsp of olive oil has more than a third more saturated fat than 100 g (3.5 oz) of pork chop.
Come to that, no one else seemed to know either, as his Seven Countries Study, published in 1970, launched the multibillion-dollar low-fat-food and cholesterol-lowering statin drug industries – while the idea that animal fats somehow clog up our arteries entered our collective consciousness.
At around the time Keys was starting to run with the saturated fats theory, another researcher was suggesting that the heart disease epidemic had more to do with sugar. Sixty years on, we’re slowly coming around to that idea – having consumed plenty of low-fat, high-sugar foods along the way.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the FMD – in fact, there’s a lot right with it – but it has next to nothing to do with the health of our cardiovascular system. White processed baguette anyone?
References
1 Rosch P et al. Fat and Cholesterol Don’t Cause Heart Attacks and Statins are Not the Solution. Cwmbran, Wales: Columbus Publishing Ltd, 2016
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