“This week’s LCHF-special” Photo: Tonny V.

Here’s road sign by a truck stop called “Rasta” or “Have a break” in Sweden . They serve Low Carb High Fat meals, a new one every week. On the sign we can also read that LCHF is an effective way to lose weight, without hunger!

Not bad, but it gets better:

Apparently they now serve LCHF-food at all Rasta restaurants, all over Sweden. You can find them here:

How about that? I guess it would be hard to find similar offers in any other country. But in Sweden LCHF is getting ever more popular for losing weight and improving ones health.

A friend texted me this picture, from a road in western Sweden.

Pretty cool car, right?

There may be a massive trend towards higher-fat diets in Sweden now. But it’s still controversial. The Swedish former boxer Paolo Roberto just published a cookbook filled with pasta recipes. When a reporter asked him if you don’t risk getting fat from eating pasta, and what Roberto thinks about LCHF, sparks fly:

 [LCHF] is a method for lazy idiots, you lose weight without exercise…

Obviously exercise is good in many ways. But why does everybody have to eat food that could make them fat without lots of exercise? What’s so stupid about losing weight even without exercise?

Roberto’s arguments seem to be based on old myths and misunderstandings:

Paolo Roberto: ”People ought to be beaten” (translated by Google)

What do you say, do the boxer have a point?

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?

#4

Can you believe this? There are now FOUR different magazines in Sweden on Low Carb High Fat eating. The latest one is a supplement to the biggest tabloid in the country, on sale everywhere.

It’s a revolution baby.

All about LCHF, #2

Here’s the latest news from the Swedish Low Carb High Fat scene. One of the biggest papers in Sweden had a 100 page supplement called “All about LCHF” back in January. It was a massive success, selling out quickly in many places. So they’ve decided to make it a recurring monthly supplement starting now. The second one is out this week.

Could you imaging having a paper about high fat nutrition in every newsstand where you live?

This is an entertaining analysis of the Swedish LCHF-movement from a sociological perspective:

Science as Culture: Food Fight! The Swedish Low-Carb/High Fat (LCHF) Movement and the Turning of Science Popularisation Against the Scientists

As the authors have no real interest in the scientific debate (just accepting the “consensus” view) they unfortunately miss the larger picture. I.e. the words “paradigm shift” are never mentioned.