The Pathways To Health
Searching for the Truth about Dietary Fats and Health
Written by Noni Kaufman, ANA Nutraceutical Consultant, Wellness Educator
"A massive crusade has been conceived to ‘lower your cholesterol count’ by rigidly restricting dietary fat, coupled with aggressive drug treatment. The public is so brainwashed, that many people believe that the lower your cholesterol, the healthier you will be or the longer you will live. Nothing could be further from the truth." -- Dr. Paul J. Rosch, President of the American Institute of Stress, Clinical Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at New York Medical College.
I recently attended a lecture by Sally Fallon, co-author of Eat Fat Lose Fat and co-author of cookbook Nourishing Traditions* with Mary Enig, Ph.D. Her talk entitled "The Oiling of America" filled in many gaps for me about why there has been so much confusion about fats and oils. The bottom line diet recommendation from her talk: If we eat a traditional diet like our ancestors--including animal fats, foods rich in saturated fats, such as coconut oil, we have a better chance of a long healthy life than if we follow the "Prudent Diet" which was launched in 1956 advocating a low fat diet including the substitution of margarine instead of butter and cereals instead of eggs.
Please read this summary and refer to the links and books provided to learn more. The subject of dietary fats is important to understand so that you can make healthy choices for you and your family. We have been educated with false information about fats for a very long time, and now, actually, over the last several years, we are being exposed to more of the truth, albeit difficult to sort out at times due to the extent of misinformation. This overall problem seems to come from misuse of scientific data and inquiry to support the edible oil industry's agenda over the last fifty years.
Why are so many people confused about fats in their diets? Why does the popular South Beach Diet book recommend against eating saturated fats? Why so much emphasis on lowering cholesterol and eating a low fat diet when we need fats to properly grow and develop, support immunity, process fatty acids, support the integrity of our cell membranes, have our brains function properly, etc. ?
What Fallon shared with us the other night was the story of "The Oiling of America," written by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, Ph.D. in 1999 and published in Nexus Magazine. It was a revealing and amazing story about the history of the move from the traditional diet to the "Prudent Diet" as the leaders in the edible oil industry with their connections to FDA officials misguided public opinion to dramatically change our diets. This has been a terrible scam perpetrated on the American public over the last fifty years.
Cut and paste the following link into your browser to read the entire story of "The Oiling of America": http://easydiagnosis.com/articles/oiling.html
To sum up what I learned from Fallon's talk and reading Enig's article: in the 1950's as the incidence of Heart Disease was climbing, there was a search for key causal factors. Some scientific studies held the hypothesis that eating saturated fats was the key contributing factor to high cholesterol levels and a high risk of coronary heart disease. This hypothesis is highly suspect since the incidence of heart disease had been climbing in the first half of the 1900’s while saturated fat consumption had been falling!
This hypothesis was referred to as the lipid hypothesis, namely that saturated fat and cholesterol from animal sources raise cholesterol levels in the blood, leading to deposition of cholesterol and fatty material as pathogenic plaques in the arteries.
Some of the people who were heavily invested in the edible oil industry began promoting this theory and producing expensive studies that supposedly proved their hypothesis. The problem was that the scientific data was often altered by grouping data incorrectly, choosing only data points that supported their hypotheses, or drawing conclusions that didn't support their findings. Also, studies that concluded that there was no link between saturated fats and coronary heart disease and especially data that those who had eaten low cholesterol diets died earlier were kept suppressed. To read more, get The Cholesterol Myths by Uffe Ravnskov, MD, Ph.D. and the article, "The Oiling of America."
Scientists who reported evidence contrary to the lipid hypothesis were harassed and threatened with loss of funding. This happened to Mary Enig who, after publishing her findings about fats in an obscure journal in 1978, was visited by the oil industry leaders and told that her funding would be taken away. Enig’s research continued to come under attack for many years. Many other researchers declined to pursue their interests in dietary fats because they knew no funding would be available to support research that might oppose the lipid hypothesis.
Another subject of misinformation were cholesterol levels indicating risk of heart disease which were set by self-appointed experts at the 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference where they set the level of 200 as the risk marker, which implied most Americans were at risk. The American Medical Association in the 1960’s, refuted the lipid hypothesis. Enig quotes from their warning: "the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol fad is not just foolish and futile. . . it also carries some risk." In the 1980’s, the physicians were sent kits to educate them about the supposed high risks of heart disease for cholesterol counts. In the early 1990’s the standard recommendation for children above two years of age was a low fat, low cholesterol diet.
Fallon argues convincingly that this misguided science and promotion of low cholesterol diets has proven to be genocidal dietary advice to Americans and has extended itself around the world as other countries mimic the low fat diets and eating fast foods. A part of this global adoption of processed foods includes the participation of Peter Barton Hutt, a lawyer with ties to the edible oil industry. In the early 1970's, Hutt became the General Counsel for the FDA and on his own authority changed the rules about food labeling in 1973. What Hutt put into practice was a policy whereby food manufacturers no longer had to state they were producing imitation foods. This opened the flood gates for processed foods in the United States.
Enig explains "The new imitation policy meant that imitation sour cream, made with vegetable oil and fillers like guar gum and carrageenan, need not be labeled imitation as long as artificial vitamins were added to bring macro nutrient levels up to the same amounts as those in real sour cream. Coffee creamers, imitation egg mixes, processed cheeses and imitation whipped cream no longer required the imitation label, but could be sold as real and beneficial foods, low in cholesterol and rich in polyunsaturates.
These new regulations were adopted without the consent of Congress, continuing the trend instituted under Nixon in which the White House would use the FDA to promote certain social agendas through government food policies."
Enig goes on to state," The American Medical Association at first opposed the commercialization of the lipid hypothesis and warned that "the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol fad is not just foolish and futile. . . it also carries some risk."
Finally, the medical community succumbed to the marketing tactics of the oil industry and started doing cholesterol screenings and recommending the "Prudent Diet" to lower cholesterol levels and supposedly the risk of heart attack. In 1990, it was recommended that all children 2 years old or older should be put on a low fat, low cholesterol diet. In The Cholesterol Myths, Ravnskov points out that the fatty streaks seen in young children used to promote the lipid hypothesis are false indicators. That is, fatty streaks in the arteries exist in all humans before birth in all populations and carry no predictive relationship to heart disease.
One of Mary Fallon's comments about cholesterol testing at the lecture was, "If your doctor wants to screen for cholesterol, find another doctor!" The data over the last 50 years does NOT support the lipid hypothesis and in fact there is significant data to show there is no relationship between low cholesterol eating and coronary heart disease. Risk levels apparently only start being a slight consideration for men at levels of 350 and above. Fallon also suggested that there is no clear scientific data to validate that there should be concerns about LDL being the "bad cholesterol" that people should consciously be working to lower. (No reference available for this, but there is information about LDL and HDL in The Cholesterol Myths.)
What followed after all the misinformation about oils and cholesterol was the marketing of cholesterol-reducing drugs. When the statin class of drugs was being researched in Japan, the scientists concluded that they were highly toxic and would have no medical applications. The patents were sold to U.S. pharmaceutical companies which produce these drugs like Lipitor that have many serious side effects beyond the fundamental error of stimulating the lowering of cholesterol. Side effects of Lipitor: reduced libido, muscle wasting, neuropathy, cancer, intestinal disease, accidents, slow reaction time, back pain, heart failure, stroke, depression, and suicide. It also inhibits the absorption of CoQ10 that is needed for muscles to function and blocks the absorption of Vitamin A. An ad for Lipitor even states that it has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attacks. Consider the increased risks of innocent drivers on the road with the statin drug consumers known to have slower reaction times and increased incidence of accidents.
Enig quotes from one of the Medical Doctors implicated in the spread of false science: " 'Many physicians will see the advantages of using drugs for cholesterol lowering. . ' said Grundy, even though 'a positive benefit/risk ratio for cholesterol-lowering drugs will be difficult to prove.' The cost in the US of cholesterol screening and cholesterol-lowering drugs alone now stands at sixty billion dollars per year, even though a positive risk/benefit ratio for such treatment has never been established. Physicians, however, have 'seen the advantages of using drugs for cholesterol lowering" as a way of creating patients out of healthy people.' "
"George Mann, formerly with the Framingham project, [a long term, large scale study of the lipid hypothesis] possessed neither funding nor patience—he was, in fact, very angry with what he called the Diet/Heart scam. His independent studies of the Masai in Africa, whose diet is extremely rich in cholesterol and saturated fat, and who are virtually free of heart disease, had convinced him that the lipid hypothesis was 'the public health diversion of this century. . . the greatest scam in the history of medicine.' "
The following is a section on the dangers of large amounts of dietary polyunsaturates written by Mary Enig in the Oiling of America." Excess consumption of vegetable oils is especially damaging to the reproductive organs and the lungs—both of which are sites for huge increases in cancer in the US. In test animals, diets high in polyunsaturates from vegetable oils inhibit the ability to learn, especially under conditions of stress; they are toxic to the liver; they compromise the integrity of the immune system; they depress the mental and physical growth of infants; they increase levels of uric acid in the blood; they cause abnormal fatty acid profiles in the adipose tissues; they have been linked to mental decline and chromosomal damage; they accelerate aging.
Excess consumption of polyunsaturates is associated with increasing rates of cancer, heart disease and weight gain; excess use of commercial vegetable oils interferes with the production of prostaglandins leading to an array of complaints ranging from autoimmune disease to PMS. Disruption of prostaglandin production leads to an increased tendency to form blood clots, and hence myocardial infarction, which has reached epidemic levels in America. "
"Vegetable oils are more toxic when heated. One study reported that polyunsaturates turn to varnish in the intestines. A study by a plastic surgeon found that women who consumed mostly vegetable oils had far more wrinkles than those who used traditional animal fats. A 1994 study appearing in the Lancet showed that almost three quarters of the fat in artery clogs is unsaturated. The 'artery clogging' fats are not animal fats but vegetable oils."
