Chapter 12

Lard is lush and butter is better! Chapter 12 is my husband’s favourite chapter. It starts off with a really interesting look at what anthropology tells us we have been eating since Australopithecus Lucy first walked upright an estimated 3.5 million years ago. We then have a really useful summary of what fats are, why they are so vital for the human body, where we find the essential fat soluble vitamins – a whistle stop tour of everything you need to know about the nutrition of fats.

We have some fun along the way – dissecting a government public advert on saturated fat and showing the breathtaking ignorance of our public authorities; we look at one of my favourite movies and what this tells us about the body’s ability and tendency to make fat. We end with one of the most critical principles of the book. Ever since the Seven Countries Study, when we have been demonising fat, we have, in fact, been talking about processed food – invariably carbohydrates. And still today we are making this huge and fundamental error. We look at what the UK, USA and Australian governments call saturated fat and they are not saturated fat. It is, of course, in the interests of the food manufacturers to keep this myth going, as the last thing they want is for the correct culprit to be identified – processed food.