Nutritionist reviews ready meals

This was quite an interesting article on ready meals. A mum and a 10 year old girl gave their views on a selection of ready meals – from Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s, Tesco, Co-op, M&S and Waitrose.

The girl was really funny – her verdict on the Sainsbury’s “Tropical Pork & Peppers” was “it looked like the dog had been sick“, while the Tesco meatball bake “had pastry which looked like mum’s” (Ah)

The reason I kept this article though was for the horrors coming from nutritionist, Angela Dowden. She went from “saturated fat, which raises cholesterol…” to “cholesterol-raising saturated fat” in a couple of columns. The first comment was bad enough, but when did cholesterol-raising become an adjective for saturated fat?!

It absolutely has not been proven that eating saturated fat raises cholesterol. If you look at the process by which cholesterol is synthesied, you would wonder what on earth fat has to do with any of it! Interestingly, carbohydrate has an important role as carbs cause insulin to be released and insulin facilitates metabolism processes in the liver, which is where cholesterol is synthesised.

When I first started writing about diet and obesity, I too thought that saturated fat raised cholesterol – because it is written as a fact in just about everything we read. But, with a fair bit of digging, it becomes clear that it is not a fact and once we are enlightened about this we become acutely aware of how it is presented as a fact time after time. Just as it is by Angela Dowden in this article.

We have to become very sceptical and tune in to every health message that is being presented as a fact and check that it really is true. The more I challenge, the more bad science I see out there.

If in doubt – go back to common sense – would nature put anything in food that would kill us?! I don’t think so. Hence nothing in real food, saturated fat or otherwise, is going to cause us fatal harm. Plus, the functions performed by cholesterol in the body are absolutely critical and this substance should not be lowered without consequence. See all my other blogs and videos about the fact that the FSA and the NHS are invariably talking about carbs when they think they are talking about saturated fat.

Every time you see someone attacking saturated fat – think about this – fat is in jail for the crimes committed by sugar and refined carbohydrates and we need to get it out!