Swedes are happily rejecting obsolete fat phobic advice. More and more Swedes just don’t fear real butter anymore. A good choice, as modern science clearly shows there’s simply no connection between saturated fat and heart disease.
Not surprisingly this leads to some hysteria from those who are still stuck in the failed fat->cholesterol->heart disease paradigm of last century. News of it appeared in a few UK papers yesterday. They even mentioned this blog!
Mail Online: Atkins diet ‘raises risk of heart disease ‘ because of a surge in cholesterol levels
Similar articles also appeared in The Independent and Metro.
While reading I couldn’t help smiling at the bizzarely inflated scary conclusions drawn from a single small observational study!
It’s of course likely that eating more fat may have increased the total cholesterol in the population somewhat. But it also increases HDL (good) cholesterol, which statistically is highly protective. Of course, ignoring HDL is par for the course when fear-mongering about cholesterol.
More importantly there are no signs that the number of heart attacks are increasing in Sweden. We seem to be just as healthy, even as the (good) cholesterol “surges”. As the years go by that will be harder and harder to explain away.
Swedes are already among the slimmest people in Europe, and according to the latest statistics the obesity epidemic is slowing to a crawl here. Meanwhile the United Kingdom, where the fear of fat is as strong as ever, has become the fattest country in Europe. Coincidence?
