Eat full fat dairy for your heart’s sake

I love this: A large new study has found that eating two or more servings of whole fat dairy foods, such as milk, yogurt and cheese, reduced the risk of heart disease. The study, recently published in The Lancet, included 136,384 people in 21 countries who were followed for an average of nine years. What the researchers found was a—

• 22 percent lower risk of heart disease
• 34 percent lower risk of stroke
• 23 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease

The fat in dairy products is saturated, folks. It’s butter fat. It irks me no end when people, such as health columnist Jane Brody, continue to use the phrase “artery clogging saturated fat.” As I’ve said before, saturated fat is simply a fat molecule in which two hydrogen atoms are attached to each carbon atom; that is, carbon atoms are “saturated” with hydrogen atoms. What’s so scary about that?

As Dr. George Mann, professor of medicine and biochemistry at Vanderbilt University and former Director of the Framingham Heart Program, said, “For fifty years the public has been told by officials of the American Heart Association and the National Heart Institute that this epidemic disease [coronary heart disease] is caused by dietary saturated fatty acids and cholesterol. That advice is quite wrong. It is the greatest biomedical error of the twentieth century. The advice lingers, for selfish personal reasons and commercial avarice.” My man! (He wrote the preface to my book, Fat: It's Not What You Think. Unfortunately, he died in 2013 at the age of 95.)

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