In this controversial, evidence-based account of how and why the health-care establishment has got the concept of ‘healthy eating’ so wrong, Barry Groves shows us how to take charge of our own health and lives, in contravention of what the health-care industry would have us believe and do.
About the authors
Barry Groves who lives with his wife, Monica, in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, can rightfully claim to be Britain’s leading exponent of the low-carb way of life as he has lived on, researched, lectured and written about it for well over 40 years.
He and Monica were overweight from 1957 to 1962, when he discovered the low-carb regime for weight loss. It worked; they haven’t been overweight since. This started his questioning of conventional diets. As a consequence he took up full-time research into the relationship between diet and ‘diseases of civilisation’ such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
As a result of his researches, he realised that the perceived wisdoms, both of low-calorie dieting for weight loss and ‘healthy eating’ for the control of heart disease, were seriously flawed.
Now an award winning international author with a doctorate in nutritional science, Barry has written both popular and more technical books which have been published in countries as far apart as Argentina and Russia, as well as all English-speaking countries.
He currently divides his time between researching and writing books, and lecturing to medical professionals and to the food industry about the management and prevention of obesity, diabetes and associated conditions.
Letter to Daily Mail by Barry Groves, published 20 January 2010
Safer margarine myth
BAN butter (Mail)? No, we should ban processed margarines
In its report of Shyam Kolvekar's view, the BBC shows him operating on an Indian Hindu. Indians have been using ghee (clarified butter) for centuries, without getting blocked arteries.
Mr Kolvekar said when he became a consultant cardiac surgeon eight years ago, the bulk of bypass operations he did were on older people. Now he's seeing people in their 40s and 50s needing triple bypasses. So are Indians eating more ghee than they did just eight years ago? Of course not.
In 1967, Dr S. L. Malhotra reported that in Madras the population was vegetarian, living mainly on rice. The principal fat in their diet was polyunsaturated peanut oil. Malhotra compared the Madrasis with a population in Udaipur in the north. Their religion allowed them to eat meat and their fat intake was almost entirely from animal sources. They cooked with ghee and had probably the highest butterfat consumption in the world.
Present-day wisdom would predict vegetarians would have the lower rate of heart disease, but Malhotra found the opposite: the vegetarian Madrasis had 15 times the death rate from heart attacks compared with the northern Indians, even though those in Udaipur ate nine times as much fat — and that fat was animal fat.
Twenty years later, a paper in the Lancet noted an increase in heart attack deaths among the latter group. By this time, their diet had been made 'healthier' by replacing traditional ghee in their diets with margarine and refined vegetable oils.
The truth is that arteries aren't blocked by eating ghee, but by adopting our 'healthy' Western diet. Many studies show South Asians in the UK have higher heart disease rates than they do in India.
Doctors invariably tell people who have had one heart attack to cut out butter and use polyunsaturated margarines, but there is no evidence this will prolong their lives.
As long ago as 1965 survival rates were studied in patients eating different fats and oils. Patients who had already had one heart attack were assigned to one of three groups, who were given polyunsaturated corn oil, monounsaturated olive oil or saturated animal fats respectively.
Blood cholesterol levels were lowered by an average of 30 per cent in the polyunsaturated group, while there was no change in the other two groups.
At first sight, it seemed men in the polyunsaturated group had the best chance of survival. But at the end of the two-year trial only 52 per cent of the polyunsaturated group were still alive and free of a fresh heart attack.
Those on the monounsaturated olive oil fared little better: 57 per cent survived and had no further attack. But those eating the saturated animal fats fared best with 75 per cent surviving and without a further attack.
The hypothesis that saturated fats raise cholesterol and clog arteries was proposed in the Fifties, but has never been verified and confirmed. If any fats should be banned, it's the processed vegetable margarines and cooking oils.
BARRY GROVES PhD,
Author: Trick And Treat: How 'Healthy Eating' Is Making Us III,
Milton under Wychwood, Oxon.
