WORDS LAURA POTTER
Photograph Gallery Stock
According to the NHS, ‘to cut your risk of heart disease, it’s best to reduce your overall fat intake and swap saturated fats (the kind found in animal fat products like cheese, butter and meat) for unsaturated fats (found in nuts, seeds, oily fish and vegetable oils)’. Yet recent headlines are dominated by a different argument: that saturated fat has been wrongly demonised, and cholesterol isn’t the cause of heart disease. ‘At medical school, we’re taught 50 per cent of what we learn will turn out to be outdated or wrong within five years,’ says Dr Aseem Malhotra, consultant cardiologist at The Lister Hospital, London. ‘When it comes to heart disease, a lot of people are regurgitating old science, either because they don’t believe it’s evolving, or have a vested interest as they’ve based their careers on these flawed hypotheses.’