Recap: Fat: The full story | Sarah Berry

Hello, and welcome to ZOE recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about fat. Since founding ZOE, I've actually started eating more fat, And that might surprise you because for decades, we've been told to fear it. Fatty food will clog your arteries and send your cholesterol through the roof. Right? Well, it turns out it's not that simple. How fat affects your health depends on a lot of factors, including the type of fat, the food matrix, even how it's produced. One thing is for sure, that single number on the front of a food packet isn't going to give you the full story. I'm joined by Professor Sarah Berry to dig deeper into fat, uncovering which will harm us, which can help us heal. One of the things that people often ask me is, well, how has your diet changed since you started ZOE? And the answer is it's changed a lot. And one of the biggest ways it's changed is that I now eat a lot more fat than I did. I was absolutely sure that fat was bad for me five years ago. My dad was basically put on very low fat diet because he was told he had very high cholesterol in his thirties. So this is now, you know, sort of forty, forty five years ago. And so that means that at home, you know, we ate this very low fat diet. As a result, we, of course, ate lots of carbohydrates because that's what you do to fill it in. And of course, lots of refined carbohydrates, pasta and bread and things like this. So I then did these soy tests, and it turns out that actually my blood sugar control was really quite bad and actually my blood fat control was much better. And so that's what the advice is pushing. But I still feel really guilty when I eat cheese. Like, it's even though I've seen this and I also have noticed the way that actually my hunger is lower when I'm eating these high fat foods, like, I still have this basic feeling that it's a bit naughty, isn't it? Like, it's not the right thing to do. What are your thoughts on that, Sarah? I've got loads of thoughts. I'll just touch on a few that I think might resonate with people. So you mentioned about your father, for example, being put on a low fat diet because he had high cholesterol. And this is still a common perspective that lots of people have around how do I reduce my cholesterol levels? Well, let's consume low fat diets because it contains cholesterol because it will increase my cholesterol levels. The first thing just to mention that I hope most people are now aware of, but in case they're not, is that if you consume dietary cholesterol, which is contained from some foods, …