High-fat diets: healthy or unhealthy?

Marie C Guldstrand (1) , Caroline L Simberg

1 Dept. of Internal Medicine

In current dietary recommendations for the treatment and prevention of Type 2 diabetes and related complications there is flexibility in the proportion of energy derived from monounsaturated fat and carbohydrate as a replacement for saturated fat. Over the past few years, several population studies have shown that subjects eating a lot of refined grains and processed foods gain a much larger increase in waist circumference than those following a diet higher in monounsaturated fat, protein and carbohydrates rich in fibres and whole grains. In this issue of Clinical Science, Sinitskaya and co-workers have demonstrated that, in normal-weight rodents categorized into three groups of high-fat, medium-carbohydrate (53/30 ratio of fat/CHO % of energy, 4.7 kcal/g), high-fat, low-carbohydrate (67/9 ratio of fat/CHO % of energy, 5.2 kcal/g) and high-fat, carbohydrate-free (75/0 ratio of fat/CHO % of energy, 5.9 kcal/g) diets, the high-fat diets that also contained carbohydrates were both obesogenic and diabetogenic while the very high-fat, carbohydrate-free diet was not obesogenic but led to insulin resistance and higher risk of cardiovascular disease. This finding may indicate that high-fat diets could easily be precipitated with carbohydrates to an unhealthy diet, pointing at the significance of macronutrient composition rather than caloric content in high-fat diets.

Mots clés: Medicine

Marie C Guldstrand, Caroline L Simberg. High-fat diets: healthy or unhealthy?. Clinical Science, 2007, 113 (10), pp.397-399. ⟨10.1042/CS20070263⟩. ⟨hal-00479392⟩