Stunning: Saturated Fat and the European Paradox
Wow. This is mindblowing.
Have you heard about the French Paradox? French people traditionally eat a lot of saturated fat, like butter – yet they generally have less heart disease than other populations. A lot of brainpower has been wasted to explain this – do perhaps the red wine protect them?
It’s not a paradox.
Of course, modern science quite clearly shows no connection between saturated fat and heart disease. That’s no secret anymore. But now it gets even more interesting:
I was just shown the diagram above, recently published in the journal Nutrition. It’s based on WHO and FAO statistics over the average intake of saturated fat in 41 European countries in 1998 (the latest available data), and the age-adjusted risk of dying from heart disease. I added some explanations.
More saturated fat, less heart disease
It’s a stunner. The French paradox is actually a French-Swiss-Icelandic-Swedish-German-Austrian-etc.-paradox!
- France eats the most saturated fat and has the lowest rate of heart disease deaths in all of Europe.
- Switzerland eats second-most saturated fat and has the second-lowest mortality.
- The countries eating more saturated fat have less heart disease, period.
Less saturated fat, more heart disease
And the countries eating less saturated fat? Like Georgia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan etc.? Well, they seem to have the highest mortality from heart disease in Europe.
It’s a Pan-European paradox now.
No need to hold the butter?
What does it mean?
Correlations between populations, like these, are known as ecological data. It doesn’t really prove anything. In other words, the diagram above does not prove that saturated fat protects you from heart disease. There are obviously many other differences between these populations, not just the intake of saturated fat.
But a diagram like this can more or less disprove a theory. It’s hard to imagine how saturated fat could be a major cause of heart disease, when European populations stuffing themselves with it are so much healthier, without exception.
Can this possibly be a weird coincidence? Can saturated fat still possibly be bad? What do you say?
PS
When I recently interviewed professor Loren Cordain about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, his guess was that they on average got about 15 percent of their calories from saturated fat.
If that’s true it means that our genes should be well adapted to eating about 15 percent saturated fat. That’s more than twice as much as the maximum in the obsolete fat-phobic advice from the USDA and others. But about as much as the healthiest populations in Europe today. Coincidence?
More: The Paleo Diet Explained
Repeat after me; The sun goes around the earth, the sun goes around the earth....
The paper you quote about increased mortality on low carb diet is actually not even worthy of the SHREDDER!! You know why? they have not checked real LCHF dieters! They have taken two existing study cohorts and based on those dreadful questionnaires extrapolated those that according to a random preset criteria ate less carbs and sub grouped them as low carbers and compared to those that were according to the same criteria as higher carbers and calculate the risk based on mortality/morbidity in the subgroups. Oh my word!!! Cannot say how bad that is!! Almsot all those people are likely to eat grains/sugar/refined starches and rubbish as well no wonder they die a little bit more!!! Bad food combinations are even worst that eliminating a whole food group!
Here let me quote from the paper itself:
Our study has limitations. The low-carbohydrate diet scores were not designed to mimic any particular versions of low-carbohydrate diets available in the popular literature. Therefore, the risk estimates do not directly translate to the assessment of benefit or risk associated with the popular versions of the diet.
The authors should be sued for misinformation and scare mongerning but they put the disclaimer in so their lawyers advised well!!
And how can you possibly have a LOW CARB vegeterina diet.!!! ALLL plant material is CARBS (unless they only ate avocados and nuts and even they pack in quite a few carbs) honestly!! The authors of that paper really need to go back to basics. !!!
If you are happy with your diet why do you insist in writing to this blog. You seem so angry and upset by the simple principles of paleo/lchf.
I am happy and MUCH healthier now and hope to live nad die by the paleo motto: leave well drop dead!
ourevoire!