The Food Standards Agency, as we know, is guided by science. Just now it is telling us that we ought to be eating less saturated fat. In a high-profile campaign we are urged to cut down on butter and hard cheese, to select the leanest of meats, and to replace whole milk with the fat-reduced version.
To an ageing farming hack like me, this is all rather mystifying. Far be it for me to question the agency's scientific expertise, but I'm old enough to remember a certain Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), published in the early 1980s. Launched 10 years earlier, it was one of the largest, expensive scientific experiments in the history of medicine, costing more than £100m and involving 60,000 men.
It set out to discover whether switching middle-aged men to lower-fat diets could reduce blood cholesterol levels and cut death rates from heart disease. Those in the intervention group were urged to cut back on meat, eat only low-fat cheese and restrict their consumption of eggs to no more than two a week. Cakes, puddings and pastries were, of course, banned.
As a result of these sacrifices, the group's consumption of saturated fat fell by an average of a quarter. Yet their blood cholesterol levels fell by only 5%, and they were no less likely to die from heart attacks than those who had carried on with their usual diets. A few months later a large-scale World Health Organisation trial came out with a near identical result.
As far as the FSA is concerned these costly trials might never have taken place. Its new campaign takes us right back to the 1970s when the discredited fat-causes-heart-disease theory was robbing us of our finest traditional foods. The agency might as well have backed their new ads with the music of T Rex or Ziggy Stardust.
I'd like to ask how our health is likely to be improved by discarding the fat fraction of whole milk, which only amounts to 4% in any case. When the milk is from cows grazing fresh pasture, this fat is rich in vitamins A and D, which strengthens the immune system and protects against cancer, as well as omega-3 essential fatty acids and the omega-6 essential fatty acid, CLA, which protects against heart disease and cancer.
An equally compelling case can be made for the nutritional benefits of beef and lamb, particularly when they're raised the traditional way on herb-rich grasslands. Yet the FSA chooses to campaign against such health-giving foods, an action that can only benefit food manufacturers who fill the supermarket shelves with processed, unhealthy fakes.
It's principally the food corporations and the drug companies that perpetuate the myth of saturated fat and heart disease. Drugs and yellow-fat spreads that promise to reduce blood cholesterol represent a vast and lucrative market, though there is no evidence they will extend our lives.
Let's remember that for years the food industry pedalled us spreads full of deadly hydrogenated fats while claiming they were "heart friendly". Why the FSA should choose to back such products and denigrate real and wholesome foods from our farms is quite beyond me.
The agency's chief error is to insist on lumping all saturated fats together, whatever their origin, then labelling them all as bad. Why, for instance, is it not investigating how the revolution that's taken place in animal production in recent years has affected the nutrient composition of staple foods? We used to produce meat and dairy foods from animals grazing pasture. Now many livestock are shut up in sheds and raised on grains and imported soya.
This shift has significantly changed the composition of modern animal fats, increasing the saturated fat content of foods and reducing the level of healthy, unsaturated fats. The World Heath Organisation, while acknowledging that dietary fat can influence the risk of heart disease, stresses that the exact composition is an important factor.
There is plenty of evidence that ruminant animals raised the natural way – on fresh pasture – produce meat and dairy products with higher levels of antioxidants and health-protecting fatty acids than those raised by the American "feedlot" system based on soya-meal and grain. Surely this merits more of the FSA's resources than the present simplistic attack on the nutritious wholefoods of the British countryside?
