The Evidence for Fat
If you have a child who is in pain, good nutrition can play a positive role for conditions that involve inflammation.
The food we eat can play a big role in how healthy we are. You can easily see what happens to a car when it is given the wrong fuel. The human body is so adaptable it can manage lots of different food sources, but it works best on good fuel, and the wrong fuel can lead to big problems.
Why is this important? At a very basic level, if your child is dealing with an illness of some kind, they already have challenges. The last thing a parent would want is to give them additional challenges to deal with. Good nutrition – good fuel – gives your child a chance to face their challenges from a solid footing, and doesn’t have them fighting on additional fronts.
If you or your child is on a low-fat diet, I’d like to suggest you look into the question of what constitutes good nutrition more deeply.
This is a difficult topic. There are so many messages pushing us towards low-fat thinking. There are industries worth billions of dollars that depend on the low-fat message. It would be easiest to take the mainstream view for granted, and assume the advice our public agencies give us about good nutrition is good advice. But there is scientific evidence that suggests we owe it to our children to look very carefully at this matter indeed. Perhaps you will stay with the low-fat story after you have reviewed the evidence.
Good nutrition is of course a far broader topic than the question of the role of fat in someone’s diet. And nutrition only one factor in the overall puzzle of good health. To complicate things further, when it comes to nutrition some factors apply to everyone while other factors relate solely to the individual.
There are vital matters of importance for your child’s health at stake and this is not a quick and trivial topic. But if you delve into this one and follow the evidence, you can at least make decisions about nutrition based on more evidence.
I certainly don’t suggest you take my word for it. But I do suggest you do your own research and form your own opinion as to whether messages we get that suggest low-fat is good are helpful when it comes to ensuring your child gets the nutrition they need.
Articles
British Journal of Sports Medicine:
Presentations
This presentation from David Diamond, Ph.D, provides background information on cholesterol research and saturated fats
Demonization and Deception in Cholesterol Research
This is the peer-reviewed article referred to in the presentation: How statistical deception created the appearance that statins are safe and effective in primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease
More detailed is this presentation from Dr Peter Attia. Read Peter’s introductory article, or jump right in and view the video below.
Here are some further articles on this matter.
Short articles about the evidence behind fat in our diet:
- The fats and the furious: how the row over diet heated up
- Michael Mosley: I’m Proof That Eating Fat Can Be Good For You
- Gary Taubes: What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie
- Peter Attia: The Great Medical Disconnect
- Chris Kresser: The Diet-Heart Myth: Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Are Not the Enemy
And a bit of a longer one:
Finally, if you would like to see the research behind LCHF (Low Carb High Fat), Dr Tim Noakes does an excellent job laying it out in his research paper Evidence That Supports The Prescription of Low-Carbohydrate High-Fat Diets: A Narrative Review.