The State of Nutrition (advice) in the UK.

UK National Diet Nutrition Survey: Still a little misguided?

The stats are out for the first of the yearly rolling reviews of the nutrition picture in the UK and it makes interesting if slightly depressing reading. Yes, we are tending to better diet but there’s still a long way to go with the populous still consuming too much in the way of salt, sugar and too little vegetable matter, fibre and omega 3 containing foods. You can read about it HERE at the Food Standards Agency website.

If you follow the link you’ll see that they have kindly given bullet points of the main findings, starting off with this little beauty:

“The key findings of the survey are:

• People are eating less saturated fat, trans fat and added sugar than they were 10 years ago, when the survey was last carried out.”

Yes, saturated fat, the perennial pariah…

The problems with gathering large quantities of dietary data are well known but surely, if we do nothing more than build public health advice on dogma rather than up-to-date, credible science, we’re just going to perpetuate the issues of poor health related to diet?

The saturated fat issue is a classic example, highlighted by the FSA and then jumped upon by the British Heart foundation, Mubeen Bhutta the policy manager there stating:

“While it’s encouraging that the amount of saturated fat people are eating has reduced, it is still too high and exceeds recommendations.”

Yet very little mention is made of research seeming to demonstrate that saturated fat intake is a red herring. For example this newest paper in the growing body of evidence HERE at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition the conclusion from the abstract summing it up with a punchy line :

“there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD”

This from a meta analysis including over 340000 participants. Now, epidemiological data is never clear cut and meta analysis can be skewed , but surely cause for concern? Surely something to discuss? Remember focusing on a non issue potentially draws focus off the real issue.

Two problems: Reductionism and saving face

There’s two main problems here, the first is Of course that reductionism doesn’t seem to be helping us too much when it comes to the study of diet related disease.

Clearly much more work needs to be undertaken to build up a better picture of causes of cardiovascular disease, however in my opinio broadening our focus and looking at the issues associated with the sat fat intake needs to happen. Indeed this is happening in research circles, but an acknowledgment of these issues to be forthcoming from the health bodies advising us, ASAP.

Of course these people aren’t suffering from some form of mass delusion and the second real issue is this: how do you change public advice when it has been so vehemently swung in one direction?

How slowly do you have to change in order to retain some sort of image of authority and thus respect from those you seek to advise? A myopic focus on one nutrient may be ineffective, even foolish. However continuing to focus on, and basing health advice around  out of date research and conclusions is criminal no?

I’d better file this one under ‘Rants’