Dr. Mark Hyman argues that sugar and starches, not saturated fat, drive heart disease and diabetes. He recommends whole foods with good fats like avocado, nuts, and olive oil while cutting sugar, and questions statins' benefits against their side effects.
Chapters
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is, is saturated fat really that bad for me? And does it cause heart attacks and what should I be eating anyway? Now you are not alone in being totally confused about fat. But here's the headline. Fat does not make you fat. And fat is not a four letter word. But why do we all think that? Well, there was a study, a population study in the 70s by Dr. Keys and he correlated that countries who ate more fat and saturated fat had more heart disease. But the problem is this correlation is not causation. In other words, every day you wake up and the sun comes up. But you didn't cause the sun to come up. But in the study it would be 100% correlation. That's the problem with saturated fat. We got sidetracked into believing that it's the problem with heart disease, but in fact we're learning that sugar is the problem, not fat. In fact, saturated fat has gotten a really bad rap. But when you look at the studies, and there's been some fantastic reviews in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, in the British Journal of Medicine recently looking at the data over the last 30 years on saturated fat and fat in general, and here's what we found. We found in fact, lowering saturated fat in your diet may lower your total LDL cholesterol. But you know what it does, it lowers the good kind of ldl, the light, fluffy, buoyant ldl. That's not a problem. And when you switch from fat, you tend to eat more starch or more sugar. And what that does is it increases the dangerous cholesterol, the small, dense cholesterol, it causes heart attacks. In fact, 75% of people who go into the emergency room with a heart attack have normal cholesterol, normal cholesterol. And they also have.
In terms of the total cholesterol, but they also have diabetes or pre diabetes. And this is really the take home here that when you eat fat, it actually helps to treat and prevent diabetes. And pre diabetes, when you eat sugar, it causes it. So when you look at the data on statins, which is written many blogs about statins, I encourage you to go back and look at them. But it's not a very good drug and it has significant side effects. You have to treat about 350 people to prevent one event. That means 349 get no benefit. The one person gets a benefit. It's not a very good drug. Plus 20% of people have significant side effects. I see it all the time. I practice muscle damage.
And pain and aching. And also it affects their mitochondria, it can affect memory and all sorts of things. So I really encourage people to really look at the issue of fat and sugar in a totally different way. You want to eat real whole fresh food. You want to eat good fats, avocados, nuts and seeds, olive oil and even saturated fat. For example from coconut butter is a great plant based source of saturated fat that has many benefits. It actually fuels your mitochondria, it's anti inflammatory and it doesn't cause problems with your cholesterol. It may fix it. In fact I have many diabetic patients. When I get them on a higher fat diet, they improve. In fact, I was just talking to researchers from Joslin's Diabetes center and you know what they're saying we should be switching to a DIET that's about 30% fat, 30% protein and about 40% starches and carbohydrates. But from plant foods, that's a total radical departure from the low fat message of the American Diabetic Association. So we need to eat the right fats, we need good fats and we need to avoid the sugars. So that's the take home. Fat doesn't make you fat. Eating good fats can help you stay healthy, even good fats from animal foods. For example, I prefer grass fed or sustainably raised animals. And I recommend the Environmental Working Group's guide to eating good quality animal products that are good for you and good for the planet so you can actually safely eat them without causing problems. But it's not the fat that's the issue, it's really the sugar. So take home. Fat doesn't make you fat. Sugar makes you fat. Eat good quality fats and real food and don't worry about it. So now I'd like to hear from you, Submit your comments, tell us what you think. How have you noticed fat and sugar affecting you? What's happened with your cholesterol when you change your diet? And I encourage you to share this newsletter with your friends, Share it on social media, with Facebook and Twitter and submit your question so that next week I may make a house call to you.
