Fat: Its not what you think!( As heart disease and obesity continu...)

As heart disease and obesity continue to plague the US, many people believe that the recent proliferation of high-fat diets is the major culprit. As a consequence, many people aim to significantly reduce the amount of saturated fats they consume with the hope that they will be slimmer, healthier, and happier. However, many leading researchers in the medical field have found that this is simply not the case. In FAT: ITS NOT WHAT YOU THINK (Prometheus, $15.95), technical writer Connie Leas, having spent years researching the subject, presents the findings of recent fat studies, explains the science behind fat and the way it interacts with your body, and sheds light on how the public has been misled into thinking that natural fats are unhealthy.

In making her argument, Leas offers some startling facts. For example:

• Overweight people live longer than those in the so-called healthy range of the BMI scale.

• No one has ever shown a correlation between egg consumption and cardiovascular disease.

• Doctors often prescribe statin drugs when our cholesterol level reaches 240, even though this is actually within the normal range.

• A porterhouse steak contains more unsaturated fat than saturated fat.

• Today Americans consume 15 percent less fat than we did in 1970, yet overall we are 20 percent fatter.

All of these statements seem to be counter to the popular conception of the relationship between fat consumption and health, a conception that Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University George Mann, MD, calls the greatest biomedical error of the twentieth century. Dr. Mann elaborates, For fifty years the public has been told by officials of the American Heart Association and the National Heart Institute that this epidemic disease is caused by dietary saturated fatty acids and cholesterol. This advice is quite wrongthe advice lingers, for selfish personal reasons an
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