Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Dietary sins of Swedish children

Dr Haglund Garemo is a paediatric nutritionist at Göteborgs University in Sweden. She defended her PhD in December 2006. The abstract is available here. She studied the socioeconomic status, diet, weight and health markers in a group of 4 year old children.

The relevant quotes from the abstract are

"The energy intake/kg was according to Nordic nutrition recommendations"

"Most children had a higher intake of saturated fat and sucrose than recommended"

"A higher BMI was associated with lower fat and higher sucrose intake"

"A lower fat intake was associated with higher BMI and higher HOMA ß-cell function"


If you had to summarise these findings they would be, with a little license, as follows: Eating fat makes you thin. Eating sugar makes you fat. Eating sugar makes you hyperinsulinaemic.


Here are some interesting interview quotes from Dr Garemo in addition to her thesis abstract:

Food and Drink Europe quote her in an interview as commenting:

"analysis of the children's body build showed that weight increases was a result of the body storing more fat, but those who ate the most fat were not the ones who weighed most. Instead, children who ate less fat had higher BMIs"


News-medical have this quote. Odd way of phrasing it, "less heightened"!

"Insulin production was less heightened in girls who ate more fat"

"Such results would go against the common perception that fat causes increased insulin production as a result of insulin resistance"



Overall, eating fat came out rather well. Most of it was saturated. That is an understatement. Interestingly that last quote above is the explanation of the bizarre medical idea that eating fat raises your blood sugar level.

It's wrong, excepting the ideas in my post on physiological insulin resistance. I doubt any of these children were eating enough fat to be in ketosis! BTW if you ever come across a diabetic person having a severe hypoglycaemic episode, please do NOT give them butter to try and raise their blood sugar, they might well die. Try sugar.

That should tell you something. Duh.

Peter

3 comments:

Alan said...

"...please do NOT give them butter to try and raise their blood sugar, they might well die..." LOL
Love it, tho if they ate more butter and less sugar they probably wouldn't be diabetic.
Out of curiosity, how much fat would you eat in a day and made up of what?

Alan said...

Damn, I forgot to tick the follow-up comments box..

Peter said...

Hi Alan,

Any post beginning with "Food" in the labels section plus butter, eggs, cream, chocolate (85% or 90% cocoa solids), cream, cream and chocolate. Maybe some extra cream. 600-700kcal carbs/protein with as much of the rest as practical being fat. Total calories add up to between 2000kcal and 3500kcal/d....

Peter