Jan Van Quirm wrote:Most dietary 'advice' these days I take with huge pinches of salt - I adore salt although I do now use low-sodium varieties a fair bit to mitigate some of the effects of my dirty little habit...
As for cholesterol - I have had tests 'as required', but never bothered to find out the results and anyway have never been told to adjust my intake of fatty nasties so I guess I'm OK. For years my mother on the other hand has been bludgeoned into adjusting hers and despite using the lowest and nastiest low-cholesterol spreads known to man, drinking skimmed milk (you might as well drink water so far as I can see or ,more importantly, taste) and using light varieties of every oil or fat substance you care to name that's edible, still had a cholesterol level of between 5-6. Finally medical advisors admitted she was a naturally high producer of natural human cholesterol and short of never eating again her levels would never fall to medically acceptable proportions...
Excess is bad for you yes. Hell - anything is bad for you or aging if you overdo it, including exercise and refusing to ingest any animal products unless you're really careful to keep your protein and yes, fat levels balanced acceptably. As soon as we're out of the womb it could be argued that we're dead meat. Do what you like and eat what you like in moderation I say - if you're happy doing that then it's good for you. If it doesn't make you happy - then stop it.
I've actually come to the conclusion that not only are fats, and particularly saturates,
never bad for one, in any quantity (within ones calorific requirements, and not adulterated, processed or over-heated), but are actually necessary for good health.
Vegetarians are often said to be risking a protein defeciency when actually it's fats they need to pay attention to. The brain is practically
made of fat.
Man is the only primate that lives outside the tropics, and saturates are abundant in vegetable sources (nuts and seeds) there.
Coconut oil, for eg., is 93% 'medium chain' saturates, including lauric acid (the main one in human breast milk), and evidence is building that it is (to use the rather hackneyed buzz phrase) a "super-food".
Essentially, I believe the whole dietary fat / cholesterol issue is a monumental scam to allow food producers to pass off cheap "value added", processed seed oils (sunflower, rape, etc') as "healthy", and corperate pharmaceuticals to con millions upon millions of perfectly healthy people into believing they are "ill" and should take their wonderful drugs - just do a little googling for "statins" and "profits" (along with "side effects").
