Research is increasingly showing that those who eat whole foods are protected from disease, whereas those who consume Western style processed foods are at increased risk of disease. There is not a single reason why the Western diet is disease causing because it comprises of a number of known disease causing agents, and their effects are hard to separate. Many of these disease causing agents were not recognised as such initially, and their detrimental effects on health have only come to light in the last few decades. Of these the trans fatty acids play an important role in the disease process. Trans fats are interesting because they were often grouped with saturated fats in early nutritional research investigating the effects of fats on cardiovascular disease. For this reasons many of the detrimental health effects of trans fats may have been wrongly attributed to saturated fat. The dangers of trans fats were recently highlighted in research that showed that higher trans fatty acid intakes were associated with an increased risk of all cause mortality1.
The beneficial effects of whole foods can be seen through observations of those consuming traditional diets. No single food is responsible for the beneficial effects of traditional diets, because they contain a number of foods to which their beneficial effects can be attributed, although most traditional diets are rich in plant foods. Many research studies have examined the dietary intakes of populations consuming traditional diets and found associations with disease. The patterns from such studies show that whole unprocessed foods tend to be associated with a reduced risk of various diseases. For example, in a recent study2, researchers investigated the diets of elderly Japanese men to uncover associations with dementia. The results showed that those subjects that adhered strongly to diets containing soybeans, soybean products, vegetables, algae, milk and dairy products, with low intake of polished rice, had a reduced risk of dementia. Therefore whole foods such as vegetables, soya and dairy are associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease.
Consistently in the nutritional literature, whole unprocessed foods are shown to have beneficial effects on the health. Or looking at it differently, they are not the disease causing agents contained within the Western diet. Foods like trans fats and sugar would be damaging to the health if consumed in isolation, but it is their synergistic effects when incorporated into the typical Western diet are particularly damaging. In the past, research has concentrated on investigating individual nutrients or foods and their effects on disease, a method of study that was borrowed from pharmacology. However, the realisation that whole diets have a greater impact on health than individual foods has resulted in a shift in thinking. The results of this research has lead to the large numbers of published studies that now show the negative health effects of the Western diet, and the protective effects of traditional whole food diets. Switching from one to the other significantly changes the risk of disease even after a lifetime of adherence to one particular diet.
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