Professor Sarah Berry

I'll just touch on a few that I think might resonate with people.

So you mentioned about your father, for example, being put on a low-fat diet because he had high cholesterol.

This is still a common perspective that lots of people have around, how do I reduce my cholesterol levels?

Well, let's consume vegetables.

low-fat diets, because it contains cholesterol, because it will increase my cholesterol levels.

The first thing just to mention that I hope most people now are aware of, but in case they're not, is that if you consume dietary cholesterol, which is contained from some foods, dietary cholesterol doesn't increase your circulating cholesterol.

So it doesn't actually increase your blood cholesterol levels, or it does only to a minimum.

It's the type of fats that you're consuming that increase your cholesterol levels.

So yes, we know that some saturated fatty acids might increase your cholesterol levels.

Yeah.

So we know that the kind of saturated fatty acids that are in butter, in palm oil, in animal fats, for example, can increase our cholesterol.

Now, cholesterol is made up of good and bad cholesterol.

And what we particularly don't want is an increase in good cholesterol alongside an increase in

in bad cholesterol.

And saturated fatty acids increase our bad cholesterol.

Some of them do also increase our good cholesterol.

So again, it's a little bit more complicated, I'm sorry to say, depending on the type of saturated fatty acid.

But what we do now know, which I don't think we were so aware of 30, 40 years ago, is that carbohydrates can have a really big impact also on our cholesterol levels and also on our circulating triglyceride levels, which we also know is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

So if you consume a diet high in refined carbohydrates, and by refined carbohydrates, I mean bread, I mean pasta, I mean rice, I mean also a lot of the processed carbohydrates like snack bars, crisps that you might consume.

What this does is at the level of our liver, it promotes the production of lipids.