Summary:
Fats were demonized by BAD science
Scientists too often stand by their failed data
Has Fauci or CNN apologized yet?
Enjoy the read and here is a supporting video by 'Fat Head' producer Tom Naughton.
How can we know that eating meats (and the fats) of animals has long been a part of our evolutionary development?
We have been cooking our food for about 1 million years. I know because I saw Rachel Welsh eating meat in one of her movies! Here are some associations you may find compelling:
Do you see monkeys thriving well above or below the equator?
Human brains are much larger compared to the apes.
A rhino is hugely muscled but poorly brained.
In the cold seasons, northern and southern latitudes produce very few fruits and vegetables.
Ancient man did NOT have storage for fruits and vegetables like we do today.
The main food in cold climates, before efficient transportation, was animal products.
We did NOT eat them raw; we cooked them!
Humans have the largest brain-to-gut size ratio.
This is from my book, "Health Freedom Lost."
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham weighs in on the importance of cooking and how it advanced humans over other creatures.33 He states,
“The biggest revolution in the human diet came not when we started to eat
meat, but when we learned to cook. Our human ancestors who began
cooking sometime between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago probably had
more children who thrived.”
Wrangham says.
“Pounding and heating food “predigests” it, so our guts spend less energy
breaking it down, absorb more than if the food were raw, and thus extract
more fuel for our brains. Cooking produces soft, energy-rich foods. Today
we cannot survive on raw, unprocessed food alone, and we have evolved to
depend upon cooked food.”
Compared to a cow, which eats raw grasses and has four large compartments in
its stomach, humans have just one small one. Cooking is a substantial reason for
that difference. Cows are large, and so is their 4-compartment stomach. And, proportionally, the cow's stomach is fifty times larger than a human's.
Here is the story behind the demonization of animal fats and cholesterol as summarized by Noel Kalicharan.
Diet and Heart Disease: How we have been deceived
Introduction
1 High-fat foods cause heart disease (wrong)
2 High cholesterol causes heart disease (wrong - and no one measures it! Bizarre.)
3 High-fat foods raise blood cholesterol (wrong)
Corollary: Eating low-fat foods will reduce your cholesterol and, therefore, your chances of having a heart attack.
You might be surprised to learn that none of these statements is true. Yet, those statements have been used to terrorize the world into taking ineffective, dangerous medications and adopting bland and useless diets for over 50 years.
If you don’t believe me, think about this: According to Dwight Lundell, a heart surgeon who has performed over 5000 bypass operations, “Every 34 seconds a person in this country dies of a heart attack. That’s a staggering statistic—every single day, that’s 2500 people who die of a disease we can cure. I’m not talking about some fancy new device. Sure, medicine has introduced fantastic new technologies to prolong life. But we can’t keep up with the growing incidence of heart disease. More people live with the disease than ever before in history.”
It means that after 60 years of research, we are no nearer to determining the cause of heart disease or what to do about it. People have offered conjectures, theories, and hypotheses, all to no avail. For every hypothesis, you can find an equal number for it as against it. They could all be wrong, and the hypothesis has nothing to do with the problem. We have spent decades chasing windmills. The chase has made enormous profits for some while people continue to die.
Keep in mind that the truth is the truth no matter what any of us believe. (There is/is not a God, regardless of our beliefs.)
Take the statement "High-fat foods cause heart disease": that statement is true or false regardless of what you and I think, regardless of what the studies show. In any case, the studies are so contradictory that no one even knows what to believe.
Most of our dietary recommendations come from big business, not from good science. These businesses have deep pockets and lobbyists in every major so-called health organization (World Health Organization, American Medical Association, American Heart Association, etc). They can afford to pay what Prof George Mann calls "operators" (pseudo-scientists) to come up with "research results" that recommend their foods. Many people get taken in when they hear "the research has shown. "... If we knew how many so-called "results" are based on shoddy research or no research at all, we wouldn't be so gullible. We'll meet Prof Mann a little later.
First, some terminology:
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The Lipid Hypothesis (Diet-Heart Idea): Dietary fats rich in saturated fatty acids raise the concentration of cholesterol in the blood. High blood cholesterol is the main cause of atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries). Atherosclerosis causes coronary heart disease (CHD) by blocking the blood vessels of the heart.
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Saturated fatty acids are found in large amounts in fats and oils that are solid at room temperature, such as butter, tallow and coconut oil.
Monounsaturated fatty acids are found in large amounts in olive oil, palm oil and lard.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids are the kind of fats found in large amounts in highly liquid vegetable oils made from corn, soybeans, safflower seeds and sunflower seeds.
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The deception begins
In 1961, the AHA published its first dietary guidelines aimed at the public. The authors, Irving Page, Ancel Keys, Jeremiah Stamler and Frederick Stare, called for the substitution of polyunsaturates for saturated fat, even though Keys, Stare and Page had all previously noted in published papers that the increase in CHD was paralleled by increasing consumption of vegetable oils.
In fact, in a 1956 paper, Keys had suggested that the increasing use of hydrogenated vegetable oils might be the underlying cause of the CHD epidemic.
In the early 1960s, Professor George Mann and his team from Vanderbilt University in Nashville took a mobile laboratory to Kenya to study the Masai people. The diet-heart idea was picking up momentum throughout the scientific world. Prof Mann had heard that the Masai ate nothing but milk, blood and meat. Shortly before this, another team from the University of Uganda had travelled a bit further north to study the Samburus.
The Masai and the Samburus are slender people who have survived as shepherds for thousands of years. Their diet is extreme. They believe that vegetables and fibers are food for cows. A male Samburu may drink over one gallon of milk each day—over one pound of butterfat. And he will eat two to four pounds of meat. A Masai will drink a little less milk but eat much more meat.
In both cases, their diets are high in saturated fat and cholesterol. If the diet-heart idea were correct, coronary heart disease would be epidemic in Kenya. Prof Mann found that their cholesterol levels were among the lowest ever measured, about 50% less than most Americans. And they do not die from heart disease. But, as he says, they might die laughing if they heard about the campaign against foods containing cholesterol and saturated fat.
Fast forward to 1991. After over thirty years of research, even though the diet-heart idea should have been rejected after many unsupportive studies, it was still going strong. Prof Mann was very angry with what he called the "Diet/Heart scam". His independent studies of the Masai, 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".
Mann resolved to bring the issue before the public by organising a conference in Washington, DC, in November of 1991. "Hundreds of millions of tax dollars are wasted by the bureaucracy and the self-interested American Heart Association," he wrote in his invitation to participants. "Segments of the food industry play the game for profits. Research on the true causes and prevention is stifled by denying funding to the 'unbelievers'. This meeting will review the data and expose the rascals."
The rascals did their best to prevent the meeting from taking place. Funding promised by the Greenwall Foundation of New York City was later withdrawn, so Mann paid most of the bills. A press release, sent as a dirty trick to speakers and participants, wrongly announced that the conference had been cancelled. Several speakers, including the prestigious Dr Roslyn Alfin-Slater and Dr Peter Nixon of London, did in fact renege at the last minute on their commitment to attend. Dr Eliot Corday of Los Angeles cancelled after being told that his attendance would jeopardise future funding.
The final pared-down roster included: Dr George Mann; Dr Mary Enig (world-renowned expert on dietary fats); Dr Victor Herbert; Dr Petr Skrabenek; Dr James McCormick, a physician from Dublin; Dr William Stehbens from New Zealand, who described the normal protective process of arterial thickening at points of greatest stress and pressure; and Dr Meyer Texon, an expert in the dynamics of blood flow.
Mann, in his presentation, blasted the system that had foisted the diet/heart-disease dogma on a gullible public. "You will see," he said, "that many of our contributors are senior scientists. They are so for the reason that has become painfully conspicuous as we organized this meeting. Scientists who must go before review panels for their research funding know well that to speak out, to disagree with this false dogma of Diet/Heart, is a fatal error. They must comply or go unfunded.
I could show a list of scientists who said to me, in effect, when I invited them to participate, 'I believe you are right that the Diet/Heart hypothesis is wrong, but I cannot join you because that would jeopardize my perks and funding.' For me, that kind of hypocritical response separates the scientists from the operators, the men from the boys."
But let's go back to the beginning.
High-fat foods cause heart disease
In 1920, myocardial infarction (MI) was almost non-existent in the US. In 1930, deaths per year from MI was about 3,000. By 1950, there were about 400,000 MI deaths per year in the US. By 1950, coronary heart disease (CHD) was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30% of all deaths. There was justifiable concern. What dietary or lifestyle changes could have caused this?
In 1953, Dr Ancel Keys (he received a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1930) published a paper in which he attributed the steady increase in CHD deaths to high-fat food. His "proof" was a graph showing a close correlation between the total intake of fat and the death rates from CHD in six countries.
Let us look at his graph, the beginning of this large-scale deception:
It looks very convincing. Its steep rise indicates that even a small increase in fat consumption would have a dramatic increase in CHD deaths.
Keep in mind that what he called "fat consumption" was merely "fat availability". The data actually represents the sum of the fat produced in the country plus the amount imported minus the amount used for purposes other than human nutrition. And, of course, no one can really know how much of that is actually consumed. Some people cut off the fat, some is eaten by dogs or cats, etc. So the "percent calories from fat" is really a very rough estimate. of the reality.
But his argument was so persuasive that, one year later, even The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, said, "The curve shows an almost convincing relationship between the fat content of the food and the risk of dying from CHD." Keys even appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.
The trickery lay not in this graph, but in what he failed to include. Data was available for 22 countries, yet Dr Keys selectively chose just the six because they supported his agenda.
Let us look at what should have been presented by a true scientist.
In parallel with the steep rise in heart disease during the period 1920-1950, a number of researchers had noticed a change in the kind of fats Americans were eating. Butter consumption was declining while the use of vegetable oils, especially oils that had been hardened to resemble butter by a process called hydrogenation, was increasing dramatically.
By 1950, butter consumption had dropped from eighteen pounds per person per year to just over ten. Margarine rose from about two pounds per person at the turn of the century to about eight. Consumption of vegetable shortening—used in crackers and baked goods—remained relatively steady at about twelve pounds per person per year but vegetable oil consumption had more than tripled-from just under three pounds per person per year to more than ten.
The statistics pointed to one obvious conclusion—Americans should eat the traditional foods that nourished their ancestors, including meat, eggs, butter and cheese, and avoid the newfangled vegetable-oil-based foods that were flooding the supermarkets.
Perhaps this would have happened and the drama and agony of the last 50 years avoided but for the intervention of Ancel Keys (1904-2004) and David Kritchevsky (1920-2006). We've already mentioned Keys.
In 1954 (the year after Keys paper), Dr Kritchevsky (Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1948) published a paper describing the beneficial effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids for lowering cholesterol levels.
The message from Keys was: reduce fat consumption and reduce your chances for a heart attack.
The message from Kritchevsky was: use vegetable oils to reduce cholesterol and hence your chances for a heart attack.
This despite the strong correlation between the rise in heart disease and the rise in consumption of vegetable oils. At least, this correlation should have suggested that further investigation was necessary rather than recommend something at complete variance with the observations.
Instead, both messages were used to determine what Americans (and the rest of the world) would eat from the 1950s until today. Simplified, this said to reduce the consumption of animal products such as butter, milk, cheese, eggs, and meat. Instead, use margarine, vegetable oils and egg substitutes. We know now that these were dangerous recommendations based on bad science.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) pointed out that good evidence is rooted in reality and develops over time whereas "wishful science" is political and promoted by those with the "loudest whistle". Wishful science is based on fancies, opinions, and the exclusion of contrary evidence. Good science is rooted in reality, so it grows and develops and the evidence gets increasingly more compelling.
If anything, the evidence for the diet-heart idea has become more contrary yet it still lives on.
The next blog will continue with the writing of Noel Kalicharan WRT cholesterol.
Index & Upcoming (short) blogs on cholesterol and statins
Number 1: Cholesterol fun (true) facts - completed
Number 2: Is the actual cholesterol molecule important? c - completed
Number 3: What is an optimal TC value? Remember, no one knows their actual cholesterol molecule value. - completed
Number 4: Surprising fact about cholesterol as an antibiotic - completed
Number 5: TC simple math - dumb doctors - completed
Number 6: What is LDL really? - completed
Number 7: Statins - do they lower the cholesterol molecule? - completed
Number 8: What did we learn from the new "biologics" to lower "cholesterol" - completed
Number 9: Niacin and other "cholesterol" management treatments - completed
Number 10: What did Natasha Campbell-McBride say about cholesterol/lipids? - completed
Number 11: What is a QALY, and how does it relate to "cholesterol"? - completed
Number 12: Idiot doctor from Johns Hopkins, Roger Blumenthal - completed
Number 13: Statins cause Alzheimer's and ALS - THEHIGHWIRE - completed
Number 14: Statin drugs CAUSE diabetes - completed
Number 15: The statin merry-go-round to poor cardiovascular outcomes - completed
Number 16: How statins CAUSE heart disease - completed
Number 17: How statins CAUSE heart disease - part 2 - completed
Number 18: Women and statin drugs - completed
Number 19: If not "cholesterol," then what? - completed
Number 20: If not "cholesterol," then what? - part 2 - completed
Number 21: Statins and erectile dysfunction - completed
Number 22: Who says statins do NOT extend life? - completed
Number 23: Statins cause strokes. - completed
Number 24: Statins & Cholesterol Summary - completed
Number 25: The history of the demonization of animal fat - completed
Number 26: The history of the demonization of cholesterol
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