Chapter 1: What surprising dietary change did the host make regarding fat?
Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about fat. Since founding Zoe, I've actually started eating more fat. And that might surprise you, because for decades we've been told to fear it. Fatty food will clog your arteries and send your cholesterol through the roof, right?
Well, it turns out it's not that simple.
Chapter 2: Why have we been told to fear fatty foods for decades?
How fat affects your health depends on a lot of factors, including the type of fat, the food matrix, even how it's produced. One thing is for sure, that single number on the front of a food packet isn't going to give you the full story. I'm joined by Professor Sarah Berry to dig deeper into fat, uncovering which will harm us, which can help us heal.
One of the things that people often ask me is, well, how has your diet changed since you started Zoe? And the answer is it's changed a lot. And one of the biggest ways it's changed is that I now eat a lot more fat than I did. I was absolutely sure that fat was bad for me five years ago. My dad was basically put on very low fat diet because he was told he had very high cholesterol in his thirties.
So this is now sort of 40, 45 years ago. And so that means that at home, we ate this very low fat diet. As a result, we of course ate lots of carbohydrates because that's what you do to fill it in. And of course, lots of refined carbohydrates, pasta and bread and things like this.
So I then did these ZOE tests and it turns out that actually my blood sugar control was really quite bad and actually my blood fat control was much better. And so that's what the advice is pushing. But I still feel really guilty when I eat cheese. Like it's even though I've seen this and I also have noticed the way that actually my hunger is lower when I'm eating these high fat foods.
Like I still have this basic feeling that it's a bit naughty, isn't it? Like it's not the right thing to do. What are your thoughts on that, Sarah?
I've got loads of thoughts.
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Chapter 3: How does the type of fat affect our health?
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.
And can you say what sort of foods those are, Sarah, just for those of us who don't think about things in this chemical way?
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. So this is another word for the kind of fats that are produced in our body.
And that increases our cholesterol levels and increases our levels of circulating triglycerides. But to loop back to what you mentioned about cheese, I think that's a really good example of how we need to move beyond this simplistic approach of thinking about the types of fat.
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Chapter 4: What personal experiences shaped the host's views on dietary fat?
So I just said that actually the type of saturated fat you have in butter is bad for us. Now, dairy cheese, so fermented dairy such as cheese and yogurt, has a really similar fatty acid composition to butter. But actually, it doesn't have the same unfavorable effects on our health as butter does. And the reason is, is because of this matrix, the kind of special structure in which dairy
The fatty acids sit within the dairy products that are fermented within the cheese and the yogurt. So you could feed people a moderate cheese diet and moderate butter diet. The cheese wouldn't have any unfavorable effects, yet actually the butter would have an unfavorable effect despite having a similar fat composition.
And despite the fact that actually basically the cheese comes from the butter, right, Sarah? So that's like even more surprising. Help us to unpack that a little bit. It sounds a bit magical.
It is because food is really complicated and it's magical because how we process food has a huge impact on its health outcomes. So how we process dairy, whether it's as butter or whether it's as cheese or whether it's as yogurt, can hugely impact health. how our body responds to it.
The same applies for how we process other foods, whether it's consuming whole fruit or consuming pureed fruit or consuming whole almonds or consuming ground almonds where you're changing the matrix. It has a huge impact on this bioaccessibility that I mentioned earlier, so the release of nutrients and how our body processes them.
And I think dairy is a really nice example of how we need to look beyond the nutrients and we need to think about the food that it's actually contained within.
So basically the food labels, which a vast effort are put onto all of these foods and which, you know, in many countries, right, the States or the UK included, talk about sort of saturated or unsaturated, are not necessarily really giving you any information that is helpful. Is that what you're saying, Sarah?
Yes, in my opinion.
I think it's worth mentioning that broadly speaking, epidemiological studies, so these big studies that will be following people over a number of years or looking at one point in time in thousands of people and then looking at certain health outcomes and looking at dietary intakes, they do consistently show that a high saturated fatty acid diet is less favorable than a high mono or polyunsaturated fatty acid diet at the population level.
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Chapter 5: What common misconceptions exist about cholesterol and dietary fat?
The calculator is free and only takes a couple of minutes. And by the way, we've spoken about perimenopause and menopause many times since starting the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast. To find these episodes, simply search Zoe Menopause in your favorite podcast player.