The truth about saturated fats?

A NEW 12-sided £1 coin is to be minted, similar to the old threepenny bit. It will have the Queen's head on one side and a competition will be held for the design on the other side. Clearly, we need a design which will see us through these changing times. How about "One Rouble"?

WOULDN'T you love to know exactly what the EU foreign affairs chief Baroness Catherine Ashton was discussing with the rebels in Kiev as the government toppled? Any promises, undertakings or assurances you'd care to share with the rest of us, milady?

IT could be worse. In Jasper Fforde's 2001 sci-fi comedy, The Eyre Affair, England and Russia are deadlocked in the 131st year of the Crimean War. The people are fed up with it. In fact, there's more interest in the latest skirmishes across the River Wye, launched by the Socialist Republic of Wales.

AN international team of scientists led by Cambridge University has found no link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. This is dynamite. Suddenly the received wisdom of the past 40 years is turned on its head. Four decades of being assured by manufacturers, celebrities and those TV-ad doctors in white coats that soft margarines and cooking oils were "the healthy option" are called into question. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Cambridge research, even though the scientists stress that it is a work in progress. Its findings, revealed this week, are the 21st century equivalent of ye olde apothecaries discovering that bleeding their patients is not helpful, or alchemists finally accepting that, no matter how long you stir the crucible, you can never turn lead into gold. What makes it much more disturbing is that the belief that unsaturated fats are healthier than saturated ones has been endorsed globally by modern, educated scientists, food manufacturers and medics who had access to all the available research and, for whatever reason, failed to examine it. The Cambridge team didn't do any new experiments. They simply re-examined data from 72 studies of more than 600,000 people in 18 countries. And thus the truth emerged: saturated fat, whether measured in the diet or the bloodstream, shows no association with heart disease.

THE British Heart Foundation seems stunned by the results and in a state of denial. Its website still tells us: "Too much saturated fat can increase the amount of cholesterol in the blood, which can increase the risk of developing coronary heart disease." It's a cop-out because, by definition, "too much" of anything is harmful.

THE engineer from BT (or Openreach, as they like to be known) arrived within 48 hours of being summoned to fix our crackling phone line. The line was crackling magnificently before he called. It crackled terrifically when he phoned for directions. It was still crackling horribly when his van pulled up. But the moment he stepped into the house and picked up the phone, well, you can guess the rest. He listened sympathetically to a dial tone as clear as a bell. "It's what we call sod's law," he explained, knowingly. There is apparently a lot of it about.

THE European Union buries its differences, stamps out petty feuding and flexes its muscles with a dazzling display of international harmony. Under a new EU law, all mobile phones will be compatible with a single type of charger by 2017. Now, isn't that worth £50,000 million a year?

GREAT inventions of our time. Scientists in Beijing have developed a tiny sensor which changes colour to tell you when milk has gone off. Lots of us already have a tiny sensor which does exactly the same job. A nose.