Zoe gets it right

I copied the information below from Zoe Harcombe's website "The Harcombe Diet". I had heard a presentation she gave about calorie counting a couple years ago and my mind was blown then. She explains cholesterol below and I bet you didn't understand it-- I didn't understand it completely either! Did you know that HDL/LDL is not cholesterol?! Oh boy.  There is so much I want to write about Zoe's diet plan, but the information I posted here is enough to get started on below!  And if you want to check out the website, the three conditions that are keeping you from losing or maintaining a healthy weight are also mind-blowing! There are three short videos explaining each one. If you don't know this, you'll never be able to maintain a healthy eating diet. I am going to start Phase 1 as soon as I finish reading what I need to do from The Harcombe Diet: Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight.  Let me know if you want to join me? Phase one is only 5 days! Very short.  Read on!:

Confession Time

This page is about things that I have got wrong along the way during my research:

The Calorie Theory

When I first (stupidly) decided that I needed to go on a diet (aged 15) I bought a book that said, quite simply, “To lose 1lb of fat you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories.” The book spelled out that, if I ate 1,000 calories a day, that would be a deficit of 1,000 calories a day (assuming I needed 2,000 calories a day) and I would then lose 7 x 1,000/3,500 = 2lbs per week.

In reality, I was a teenager, playing hockey, athletics, tennis and rounders for the school. I was a qualified lifesaving instructor and worked at the local leisure centre teaching lifesaving and therefore doing a huge amount of swimming. And I was growing! My calorie need was probably way more than 2,000 calories a day and the fact that I could start such a damaging diet so easily was horrific.

I have since discovered that this ‘formula’ is the amount of FAT that one is supposed to lose – more is supposed to be lost in water and, sadly, lean tissue will be lost too.

When I started the diet I was a healthy 5’2″ and 8 and a half stone. I started one October, after a couple of cruel comments on a school trip about my weight. If the calorie theory worked, 6 months later, I would have been 4 stone, 4lbs. Not a pound more, or less – that’s what a formula means. In fact I was approximately 7 stone by the time of my 16th birthday, in the March, and it took 3-4 months to lose another stone. By the summer I had full blown anorexia.

I knew at this time that the formula didn’t work, but I still didn’t properly dissect ‘the calorie theory’ until the summer of 2009. The findings from this summer are being pulled together at the moment into a book on the subject. In my first book “Why do you overeat? When all you want is to be slim” I gave a number of examples about the calorie theory, illustrating that it simply did not work, but I did not blow it apart as I will do soon…

Fat and Cholesterol

This one is more serious, as I have to confess that I have actually had published some incorrect statements about fat and cholesterol.  When I started doing obesity research, literally every book and document I read cautioned about the danger of saturated fat and that eating saturated fat causes heart disease directly and indirectly via raising cholesterol. I read this in all public health literature, in every medical publication available and in every other source of research I could find. Why would I question this? I had no reason to doubt its validity.

Even doing my Diploma in Diet & Nutrition, the same messages were given – saturated fat is bad for you and cholesterol equally so. We learned about ‘bad’ cholesterol (LDL) and ‘good’ cholesterol (HDL) and what cholesterol measurements ‘should’ be.

I should have thought that common sense alone tells us that fat and cholesterol are essential substances for the human body and that eating any real food cannot be bad for us. However, I just didn’t think that everything we have been told about fat and cholesterol was wrong. Now I know that it is.

The confession, therefore, is that Chapter 5 in “Why do you overeat?” has some errors in it and will be corrected in the next reprint. There are sadly similar references in “Stop Counting Calories” and “The Recipe Book” and these are being corrected with reprints in November 2009. I must have had some subconscious (not so) common sense, as I still managed to get the essence of the chapter in “Why do you overeat?” right (the title is “Fat is not the enemy“) and I had started challenging the ‘overwhelming evidence’, but I hadn’t gone far enough. The 3 myths challenged in this chapter are “Eating fat makes you fat”; “Eating fat increases cholesterol” and “Eating fat increases the risk of heart disease”. These myths were all rightly attacked, but I still talked about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol and said that saturated fat intake had an impact on bad cholesterol. I now know all of this to be untrue. Here is what I have found – doing my own research – since qualifying as a nutritionist:

1) It absolutely has NOT been proven that eating saturated fat causes heart disease (please see my videos on the “Info” page on this site).

“Fact one: Cholesterol and/or saturated fat in the diet do not raise cholesterol levels. Fact Two: Fact one is unimportant because a raised cholesterol level does not cause heart disease.” Dr Malcolm Kendrick, “The Great Cholesterol Con.”

“Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.” Gary Taubes, “The Diet Delusion.”

The most that anyone will be able to establish is that, in some countries, it can be observed that saturated fat consumption is high and heart disease is high and in some countries both are low. And in some countries fat consumption is high and heart disease low and vice versa. So, there is not even a consistent ASSOCIATION, let alone a CAUSATION. It absolutely has NOT been proven that eating saturated fat causes heart disease. It would be incredible if this were proven given that evolution says, if real food were bad for us, we would have died out or evolved not to need it – there is obviously no evidence of either.

2) There is no such thing as good and bad cholesterol (this is also covered in the same videos).

Cholesterol is not water soluble, so it cannot travel freely around the blood. It travels around in things called lipoproteins and there are actually 5 of these – not just the 2 that we hear about – LDL and HDL. The 5 lipoproteins, in order of size, are: Chylomicrons (this is a daft name – these should be called Extremely Low Density Lipoproteins); Very Low Density Lipoproteins; Intermediate Density Lipoproteins; Low Density Lipoproteins and High Density Lipoproteins. Density just means ‘packed together’, so the cholesterol in VLDL is less tightly packed together than the cholesterol in HDL.

HDL and LDL are not even cholesterol, therefore, they are lipoproteins – carrying cholesterol. LDL carries cholesterol from the liver to the cells all around the body to do its vital work. HDL recycles cholesterol from the body’s cells and carries it back to the liver. The liver makes most of the cholesterol that we need (it would be virtually impossible to eat the amount of cholesterol that the body needs), so the body sensibly reuses cholesterol and takes it back to the liver to be reused (if cholesterol were dangerous for us, surely the body wouldn’t take it back to the liver?!) If anything, LDL should be called the transporter of ‘fresh’ cholesterol and HDL should be called the transporter of ‘recycled’ cholesterol.

The next time someone says to you that LDL is bad cholesterol and HDL is good cholesterol, first please correct them and say that neither is actually cholesterol. Then ask them what is bad about LDL and what is good about HDL – what do each of them actually do that is either good or bad? If you really want some fun with your doctor, take along the chemical process for the synthesis of cholesterol and ask  where eating fat can impact any stage of the process!

3) The only bad fat is man made fat – transfats and hydrogenated fats – these have been banned in Denmark, Switzerland and certain states in the USA. They should be banned everywhere. Any fat found naturally in food that nature provides cannot be bad for us. Nature puts fat in everything from meat to fish to nuts and seeds and even some fruits, like avocados. Any real fat is fine.

4) There is not one food on this planet that is only one type of fat. When I first realised that we had been fed a lot of, quite frankly, untruths, about fat, I analysed from scratch the fat content of 50 common foods. The results stunned me and they may stun you…

Did you know that olive oil not only contains saturated fat, but that it has 9 times the saturated fat of pork?!

Did you know that the main fat in lard is monounsaturated fat?!

Did you know that I cannot find a meat (I’ve tried chicken, lamb, beef, pork – even whale) that has more saturated fat than UNsaturated fat?! Every meat I have analysed is mainly UNsaturated fat.

The Food Standards Agency and the NHS have the following foods on their list of “saturated fats” – biscuits, cakes, sweets, chocolate, cakes, savoury snacks, crisps, pies, pastries and ice cream – all primarily carbohydrates, not fats. The fat content in most of these products  is, again, still more UNsaturated fat than saturated.

5) The number ’5′ as a cholesterol target has no scientific basis. It is just a nice round number. An even nicer number (for the Statin producing companies) would, no doubt, be 4 – then most of the ‘developed’ world would ‘need’ statins.

The largest study in the world ( Schatz, Masaki, Yano et al: “Cholesterol and all cause mortality in elderly people from the Honolulu heart programme: a cohort study”. The Lancet. 2001) reviewed cholesterol concentrations over a 30 yr period. The study stated “A generally held belief is that cholesterol concentrations should be kept low to lessen the risk of cardiovascular disease… we did a longitudinal assessment of changes in both lipid and serum cholesterol concentrations over 20 years and compared them with mortality.” Conclusion:  “Our data suggest that those with a low serum cholesterol maintained over a 20 year period, will have the worst outlook for all cause mortality.” i.e. the lower your cholesterol level, the more chance you have of dying.

When you realise the many and vital functions performed by cholesterol in the body, this makes absolute sense. For everything from your sexual to mental health, seriously think about allowing any one or any drug to lower your cholesterol levels. Eat only real food and your body indicators will reflect your good health.

From now on…

I am really sorry that I didn’t challenge these massively widely held views sooner. There are references in the first editions of “Stop Counting Calories” and “The Recipe Book” that refer to cholesterol and fat in ways that I now know to be wrong. I will do everything I can to not get it wrong again.

I now believe NOTHING that I hear from public health authorities about diet and nutrition. Every advert I see on TV I question, every public health document, articles in the media – once you switch on to the need to challenge, you would be staggered at how much misinformation we are being given on literally a daily basis. Here are just a couple of examples:

1) The FSA produced an advert on saturated fat in February 2009. I have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about it. It shows a jug of ‘saturated fat’ being poured down a sink, clogging up the U-Bend, and it states that this is what happens when we eat saturated fat.

First of all – we eat food, we don’t intravenously inject it. The image of ‘pouring fat into our arteries’ is outrageously and irresponsibly false and misleading.

Second, as pointed out above, the FSA is referring to carbs most of the time they think they are talking about saturated fat.

Third, if fat (in the form it enters the blood stream after it has gone through the digestive process, assuming we don’t inject pork chops) clogged up our blood circulation system in any way – surely it would clog up veins before arteries? It never does. Not rarely, but never. There is something unique about arteries that causes them to sustain damage and this then enables ‘scabs’ to form on top of the damage and this is the plaque formation that we observe. In no way is a pork chop a) swimming around our blood stream or b) clogging up our arteries!

2) 5-a-day – take something as simple as this little slogan. You would think that this would have substantial evidence behind it to become such a fore runner of our public health messages. This has no such scientific evidence. 5-a-day is probably no more scientific than the fingers on one hand. Is it still a good thing to aim for?

Not at the expense of a better public health message that we could have imbedded in people’s minds instead “Eat real food.”

Not if people are trying to eat 5-a-day IN ADDITION to everything else they are eating, which appears to be the case.

Not for anyone carb sensitive, for whom fruit and high carb vegetables are best avoided.

Not for anyone who is overweight (that’s two thirds of the ‘developed’ world), for whom unlimited (green) vegetables and salads will be great, but fruit will be best avoided.

Not for people who add more rubbish into their diet trying to get their 5-a-day – check out internet advice sites for ‘getting your 5-a-day’. Adding sweetcorn to (white flour) pizza is one suggestion, eat tinned (full of syrup) fruit is another – we are eating even more rubbish trying to get our 5-a-day – this is public health advice gone mad.

Just hold this thought and challenge everything you hear or read that doesn’t seem to make sense in this context:

If we started eating foods provided by nature 24 hours ago, agriculture (large scale access to carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for any modern disease…

Zoe Harcombe October 2009