Fat chances: you're better off with exercise

I knew it. Well, I didn't know it, but I suspected it strongly. This week, medical science is publicly admitting there's no link between the saturated fats you eat (butter, nuts, poultry, red meat, chocolate cake, etc.) and heart disease.

A lifetime of people telling you not to eat this or that evil thing, or conversely to eat something else much more virtuous — or you will die of a heart attack — is now known as bad science.

At least, this week, that's the case. Scientific studies get released quite regularly, with alarming and sometimes contradictory conclusions.

But debunking the bad fat/bad heart link isn't exactly news to the scientific community. If you do a quick search, you'll find reports questioning the link between diet and heart disease going back for years.

But Tuesday seemed to be a watershed day with the public release of a review of data compiled with funding from the British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, Cambridge National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre, and Gates Cambridge.

Like all news of this type, it circled the globe as fast as a shock wave from a volcano. And unless we take note, it will subside just as fast.

The review was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It studied medical data gathered from 600,000 people in Europe, North America and Asia. What they ate, and what they died of.

I myself happen to be the subject of a couple of these wide-ranging, long-term data studies. Once a year or so, somebody from the study calls me, and I answer questions on all sorts of topics relating to my physical and mental health.

To start, they took a few measurements, and drew a little blood.

The data will be compiled with that of many thousands of others, over many years, until I die. There. So you don't need to die before you donate your body to science. Who knew?

The benefit of the public release of this study is not just the debunking of myths about diet. I've believed all my life that “all things in moderation” was a better health plan than trying to keep lists of polyunsaturated omega-somethings straight in your head.

It's long been known that you can get fat on a low-fat diet. Doctors report heart patients with both high and low cholesterol counts.

If half of heart disease sufferers consumed too much of the so-called bad fats, it also means half of them didn't. So what's the link?

But we also know that heart disease and stroke are the top killers of humanity in developed countries — far exceeding all other causes of death.

So if avoiding saturated fat in one's diet isn't the answer to reducing your chances of dying too soon from the Number One killer, is there anything else we can do to put the odds better in our favour?

Yes, of course there is. The only medicine that is proven to better your chances against heart attack and stroke (and depression, high blood pressure, kidney disease, diabetes and even dementia) is free and public domain.

It is exercise. Steady, frequent, prolonged and strenuous enough that for some periods, you work hard enough that cannot sing while doing it.

In our busy world, people would rather take a pill, rather than go for a brisk walk. But the economic, individual and social costs of doing that are enormous — and rising.

Red Deer does not have any more space to accommodate any more dialysis patients. The Number One preventative for people to not need dialysis in the first place (not in every case, but for most) is regular exercise.

Obesity is a top cause of diabetes. Diabetes is a top cause of renal failure. Incidence of both is rising in our society. Obesity, of course, is also a high risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

A medically-prescribed program of vigorous exercise is not a magic bullet against all this, but it is the closest thing we've got. And the side effects are a lot more acceptable.

The road to maintaining good health is not cutting “bad” foods out of your diet. It is not chasing after obscure fruits or re-creating the menu of a cave man. And it is not putting blind faith in costly pills whose side effects can be as bad as the disease.

It is as simple as walking to work, and walking while you work. It is as free as going for a light run or bike ride, instead of watching TV.

And then, for simple pleasure's sake, having a nice slice of pizza afterword. Or putting sour cream or full-fat yogurt on your baked potato, instead of the horrid, insipidly disappointing fat-free kind.

Now that's my kind of science.