Food rant 3

Fat is a dirty word. It sounds very simple. You eat too much fat, you get fat. But is that really true? The supermarket shelves are groaning with low fat this and reduced fat that. And yet we are getting fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker. In recent years, two new kinds of fat have been invented. They are Good Fat and Bad Fat. Good Fat is the stuff you find in oily fish, avocadoes and olive oil and Bad Fat is the stuff you find in cheese, butter and red meat.

The biggest and scariest bogeyman is cholesterol. Do you remember being told that eggs are bad for you? They contain cholesterol and should be limited to two a week or less. Did you also know that advice has been quietly shelved because your body produces its own cholesterol and that has a far greater affect on your body levels than how many eggs you eat? Cholesterol is an essential part of our biochemistry, being the precursor to all our steroid hormones as well as being part of the membranes of our cells. Too low a cholesterol level can make you ill. There is a small but growing backlash against the perceived wisdom that high cholesterol is actually bad for you. And recently, two new types of cholesterol have been invented. Good Cholesterol and Bad Cholesterol. Sound familiar? But wait! Bad Cholesterol has now been further subdivided into Good Bad Cholesterol and Bad Bad Cholesterol. I give up at this point because all this tinkering with our diets, based on new scientific evidence that goes against generations of knowledge (eggs are good for you) always makes things worse instead of better. Funny that.

And then there is saturated fat. I think things actually ARE fairly simple in this respect. I am a butter girl and always have been, despite the sensationalist reports about how it kills you if you look at it. Why? Well what is margarine*? What actually is it? It is not food. It is a collection of manufactured gunk that has been formulated by an industry that doesn’t fully understand how food works. I’ll just eat the butter thanks. I don’t like cows milk and so on the rare occasions I have to drink it, I drink skimmed because the flavour is slightly less disgusting but if they are removing the fat from milk what else are they removing? There are several vitamins that are fat soluble, A, D, E and K are the ones that spring to mind but there may well be other things, which we do not yet understand but which have a beneficial effect on our health. I eat full fat cheese and, when it is possible to find it, full fat yoghurt too because again, what else are they removing along with the fat? And perhaps more importantly, what are they adding in instead? Well mostly sugar of course but in the US, some people are railing against this. They don’t want added sugar in milk given to children, good lord no! They want artificial sweeteners instead! Yes, they want milk with the fat taken out and artificial sweeteners put in to give to children. What is this stuff? It is not milk. It is not food. Unsurprisingly, there is now some evidence to show that perhaps saturated fat doesn’t kill you if you look at it after all. Stand by for the invention of two new types of saturated fat..

Furthermore, it turns out that due to the amount of processed food we eat, our body fat composition is actually changing. And that worries me. Our body fat is not just a useless lump of unwanted stuff in the mirror but an actual organ, with hormone systems and different roles depending on where it is in the body. That fact that fat is now a very different sort of fat to our pre-processed food days surely must have an effect on our health, whether we understand it or not.

The Dolmio sauce pictured above has one of the most shocking labels I have read so far. Why? It contains only the ingredients that I would actually put into a sauce myself. It is all real food. Tomatoes, herbs etc. Wow!

*Incidentally, “vegetable oil” is in the same category as margarine. It is a very highly processed food like substance that bears very little resemblance to its origins as corn or rapeseed. Olive oil you get from squeezing olives (more or less).