The world of nutrition is a confusing one. Research and fashion (a strange combination!) mean that foods go in and out of favour.

It may be time to think again about saturated fats, according to Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist at Croydon University Hospital, London.

The campaign against fat has been waged for the last three or four decades but it may have been misguided. Removing fat from food makes it tasteless and something has to be added: sugar. As you probably know, processed foods contain a lot of sugar and this may lead to the high levels of obesity seen in the Western world.

Fats have been lumped together, good and bad; we know that transfats are bad and are now being phased out of processed foods. Dr Malhotra has recently written in the British Medical Journal: ‘Recent prospective cohort studies have not supported significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk’ and: ‘Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective’. Saturated fats are found in meat and dairy products and the latter contain important nutrients such as vitamins A and D, calcium and phosphorus.

Much of the pressure towards eating less fat came from the hypothesis that cutting down on fat would mean that cholesterol levels would drop and there would be a reduction in heart disease. Only 25 per cent of the cholesterol in our bodies comes from diet; the rest is made in the liver. Recent studies have found that only one type of low density cholesterol (LDL, regarded as bad cholesterol) causes heart disease and it’s not one that can be altered by less saturated fat.

As you might expect, not everyone supports Dr Malhotra’s views; both the British Heart Foundation and Public Health England disagreed. Rightly they say that studies on diet and disease often produce conflicting results owing to the difficulty of conducting properly controlled and randomised studies.

The American Heart Association considers that sugar is much more harmful than saturated fats and, unsurprisingly Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance: The Truth About Sugar, agrees.

What should we do? Trust our bodies and eat real home-cooked food with plenty of vegetables, nuts and pulses and a little of what you fancy, perhaps butter and cheese, is the best way, I think.