We are shocked and appalled by the new Heart Foundation dietary advice. The direction that nutrition has taken in Australia is a human health and environmental disaster. The Heart Foundation adds fuel to the high animal product/low carb ideology that has been endorsed by CSIRO and embraced by health practitioners and the public. Other nations have not followed this trend. The American Heart Association recommends restricting high fat dairy foods and Canada has removed the dairy foods group from its dietary guidelines.
The Heart Foundation has released new position statements on ‘Heart Healthy Eating’ – high fat dairy foods are back, and eggs are no longer restricted to one per day. There is a caveat that this does not apply to people with heart disease, diabetes or high cholesterol. That could be almost everyone: it’s Malcolm’s clinical (GP) experience that most of his patients have cholesterol levels above the safe range unless they are plant-based or already on medication for high cholesterol, and most adult Australians have significant undiagnosed artery disease.
There are some odd conclusions in the Heart Foundation documents – egg consumption increases the risk of diabetes (by 68%) and the subsequent risk of heart disease, but eggs are apparently ok until they give you diabetes.
It would be a monumental task to go through the new Heart Foundation position statements and evidence reports and to deconstruct the ‘evidence’ they used to conclude that eating high fat animal products is heart healthy. The reports acknowledged that a fair bit of the ‘evidence’ came from food industry funded studies and we have previously observed that the influence of research funding goes well beyond that which is declared. Dr McDougall has said that we have the truth but they have the money.
The Heart Foundation experts do not seem to have discovered TMAO, a new and powerful heart risk factor, which was a ground-breaking discovery in 2013, and has been supported by many further studies including a recent Australian study which found high TMAO levels in people on Paleo diets. TMAO in the blood comes from the action of gut microbes on the carnitine in red meat and the choline in eggs and other animal products. People on long term plant-based diets do not produce TMAO. An inconvenient truth for meat and eggs? A low-fat whole food plant-based diet is the only one – published in the peer reviewed literature – showing reversal of heart disease. Whilst the Heart Foundation does recommend eating plenty of vegetables, fruits and wholegrains, they should have foreseen that their position statements would generate media headlines such as ‘eat more cheese’ which would be happily taken up by the general public who “love to hear good news about their bad habits”.
PS We have two FAQs on our website which address the egg and dairy industry research.
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