By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
This
article is taken from a talk I gave at the 29th Annual
Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque
last week, on the controversial subject of saturated fats. Some
of the slides that I used for this talk are put in here.
The medical
establishment and government health authorities say that consumption
of saturated animal fats is bad for us and causes heart disease.
According to the lipid hypothesis — the label used for the diet-cholesterol
theory of heart disease — saturated fats raise serum cholesterol
levels, and high blood cholesterol causes obstructive plaques to
form in arteries, called atherosclerosis. This pathologic
process causes coronary heart disease and the need for coronary
artery bypass surgery, which is what I do.
Types
and Structure of Fats
Animals and
tropical plants contain saturated fats while plants outside the
tropics have mostly unsaturated fats. Saturated animal fats are
in milk, meat, eggs, butter, and cheese. And tropical coconut and
palm oil contain a lot of saturated fat.
The food industry
makes trans fats. They do this by shooting hydrogen atoms into polyunsaturated
vegetable oils. This straightens out the fatty acid molecules and
packs them closer together, giving vegetable oil so treated a solid
texture like lard. Trans fats are used to make margarine, with yellow
bleach added so it looks like butter. They are also used prolong
the shelf life of bakery products, snack chips, imitation cheese,
and other processed foods.
Fats have a
string of 3 to 22 carbon atoms. The carbon atoms of saturated fats
have a full complement of hydrogen atoms attached to them. Unsaturated
fats lack a full complement of hydrogen atoms. Artificially created
trans fats have hydrogen atoms that wind up being located on opposite
sides of the carbon double bond, which straightens the molecule
out and makes it mimic saturated fat.
Crisco
A hundred years
ago less than one in one hundred Americans were obese and coronary
heart disease was unknown. Pneumonia, diarrhea and enteritis, and
tuberculosis were the most common causes of death. Now, a century
later, the two most common causes of death are coronary heart disease
and cancer, which account for 75 percent of all deaths in this country.
There were 500 cardiologists practicing in the U.S. in 1950. There
are 30,000 of them now — a 60-fold increase for a population that
has only doubled since 1950.
and Gamble started marketing Crisco as a new kind of food. The name
Crisco is derived from CRYStalized Cottonseed
Oil. It was the first commercially marketed trans fat. Crisco
was used to make candles and soap, but with electrification causing
a decline in candle sales, Procter and Gamble decided to promote
this new type of fat as an all-vegetable-derived shortening, which
the company marketed as a "healthier alternative to cooking
with animal fats." At the time Americans cooked and baked food
with lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter. Procter
and Gamble published a free cookbook with 615 recipes, from pound
cake to lobster bisque, all of which required Crisco. The company
succeeded in demonizing lard, and during the 20th century
Crisco and other trans fat vegetable oils gradually replaced saturated
animal fats and tropical oils in the American diet.
Supporting the Lipid Hypothesis
Rabbits,
Cholesterol, and Atherosclerosis
In 1913 a Russian
physiologist fed high doses of cholesterol to rabbits and showed
that cholesterol caused atherosclerotic changes in the rabbit's
arterial intima like that seen with human atherosclerosis. Over
the ensuing decades other investigators did atherosclerosis research
on cholesterol-fed rabbits, which they cited in support of the diet-cholesterol
theory of heart disease.
Framingham
Heart Study
In 1948, government-funded
investigators began following some 5,000 men and women in Framingham,
Massachusetts to see who developed coronary heart disease. They
found that people with elevated cholesterol were more likely to
be diagnosed with CHD and die from it.
Six years later
the American Heart Association began promoting what it called the
Prudent Diet, where "corn oil, margarine, chicken, and cold
cereal replaced butter, lard, beef, and eggs."
Ancel Keys
Six-Country and Seven-Country Studies
Ancel Keys,
the father of K-rations for the military, published a study in 1953
that correlated deaths from heart disease with the percentage of
calories from fat in the diet. He found that fat consumption was
associated with an increased rate of death from heart disease in
the six countries that he studied.
He followed
this up with a more detailed Seven Country Study published in 1970,
using three of the countries that were in the original six-country
study — Italy, Japan, and the U.S. — and four other countries —
Finland, Greece, The Netherlands, and Yugoslavia. This study further
cemented the association of fat consumption and death from heart
disease, which led to the McGovern Report.
McGovern
Report
The U.S. Senate
Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Senator
George McGovern, released, in 1977, its "Dietary Goals for
the United States," designed to reduce fat intake and avoid
cholesterol-rich foods. These dietary goals became become official
government policy.
Further
Developments
McDonalds
and the Center for Science in the Public Interest
Next, in 1984
the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy
group, joined the fray and started to coerce fast-food restaurants
and the food industry to stop baking and frying food with animal
fats and tropical oils. McDonalds fried its French fries with beef
fat and palm oil. That’s why they tasted so good. But the Center
for Science in the Public Interest's well-orchestrated saturated
fat attack coerced McDonalds and other fast-food chains to switch
to partially hydrogenated, trans-fat vegetable oil.
USDA Food
Pyramid
Adhering to
the now well established low fat dogma, the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
in 1992, published its Food Guide Pyramid. The "pyramid"
arranges food in sections that convey the message, "Fat is
bad" and "Carbohydrates are good." Carbohydrate-rich
bread, cereal, rice, and pasta fill the large bottom space. and
are to be consumed in abundant amounts, "6–11 servings"
a day. Further up, as the pyramid narrows, fruit, which is also
high in carbohydrates, is accorded "2–4 servings"; whereas
the portion that includes meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs,
and nuts is allowed only "2–3 servings." Fats and oils
are placed in the small top portion of the pyramid and labeled "Use
sparingly."
Dietary
Guidelines for Americans 2010
Beginning in
1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health
and Human Services has published every five years an updated Dietary
Guidelines for Americans. The most recent one, published in
December 2010, recommends reducing saturated fat intake to 7 percent
of caloric intake, down from its previously recommended 10 percent.
Meet the
Fats
The USDA dietary
guidelines and the American Heart Association group trans fats and
saturated fats together and demonize them both as solid fats. The
heart association's website has a "Meet the Fats" link
where the bad fats brothers are Sat and Trans — saturated fats and
trans fats. The better fats sisters are Poly and Mon — polyunsaturated
and monounsaturated fats.
Swedish
Heart Institute, Seattle and Dean Ornish
Indoctrinated
in low-fat dogma by health organizations, nutrition authorities,
and the government, I would instruct my heart surgery patients to
eat a low fat diet, telling them to cut all the fat off their meat
and not eat more than one egg a week. And following the USDA food
pyramid I did not express any concerns about how much carbohydrates
they might consume, from starch in bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes
and sugar in fruit, fruit juices, pastry, and sodas.
When I was
the director of the heart institute at Swedish Medical Center in
Seattle in the 1990s I looked into establishing a Dean Ornish Program
for Reversing Heart Disease at Swedish. The Ornish Program limits
fat intake to less than 10 percent of calories in the diet, with,
as one study shows, only 1 percent saturated fat. I had a cardiologist
at Swedish accompany me to New York to visit the leading Dean Ornish
Program there. We came back and recommended that Swedish establish
one in Seattle.
I was wrong.
Several years later, after leaving Swedish and rejoining the faculty
the University of Washington, I came upon an article by Dr. Mary
Enig and Sally Fallon titled "The Oiling of America" that
was published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. It stimulated
me to look more carefully into this subject.
Sleeper
Oscar Wilde
said "Life imitates art." He noted that "Life imitates
art far more than art imitates life." In his film Sleeper
Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, part owner of the Happy Carrot Health
Food Restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was cryogenically frozen
in 1973 after a botched peptic ulcer operation done at the now closed
St. Vincent’s Hospital. Two hundred years later scientists wake
him up and revive him.
Scene from
movie
from this movie (shown at the meeting), the two scientists have
this exchange. Dr. Aragon: "Has he asked for anything special?"
Dr. Melik: "Yes. This morning for breakfast he requested something
called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk." Dr. Aragon:
"Oh yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years
ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties." Dr. Melik:
"You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or
hot fudge?" Dr. Aragon: "Those were thought to be unhealthy,
precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true." Dr.
Melik: "Incredible!" The YouTube title of this scene is
Woody
Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper may accurately portray healthy
eating in the future, (available HERE),
is said to be America's original carbohydrate-rich, protein-rich
nutrition bar. It was popular in the 1970s and is still sold. I
got this one from Amazon.com (that I show at the meeting). As this
cinematic work of art predicts, in 2173 deep fat, steak, cream pies,
and hot fudge will have replaced wheat germ, organic honey, and
tiger's milk as health foods.
But if life
does imitate art, what about all the evidence that shows saturated
fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause atherosclerosis?
Evidence
Against the Lipid Hypothesis
Feeding
Cholesterol to Omnivores Does Not Cause Atherosclerosis
Plants do not
contain any cholesterol. Animals are the only source of cholesterol,
and herbivores do not eat animal products. Rabbits, being a herbivore,
are not designed to digest animal fat and cholesterol, so when it
is fed high doses of cholesterol one should not be surprised if
the cholesterol winds up getting stuck in any part of the poor rabbit,
including its blood vessels. Feeding high doses of fat and cholesterol
to omnivores, like rats and dogs, does not produce atherosclerotic
lesions in them.
Other Countries
with CHD-Death and Fat Consumption Data
Evidence against
fat wilts upon close scrutiny. In his Six Country Study, Ancel Keys
ignored data available from 16 other countries that did not fall
in line with his desired graph. If he had chosen these six other
countries [on the left side], or even more strikingly, these six
countries [on the bottom right] he could have shown that increasing
the percent of calories from fat in the diet reduces the
number of deaths from coronary heart disease.
22 Countries
with Such Data including four other groups of people
If Keys had
included all 22 countries in his study, the result would have been
a clutter of dots like this.
In fact, it
turns out that people who have highest percentage of saturated fat
in their diets have the lowest risk of heart disease.
Diets in
People with the Lowest Risk of Heart Disease — Masai, Inuit, Rendille,
Todelau
The diet of
the Maasai tribe in Kenya and northern Tanzania consists of meat,
milk, and blood from cattle. It is 66 percent saturated fat.
The diet of
Inuit Eskimos in the Artic, consisting largely of whale meat and
blubber, is 75 percent saturated fat; and they live long healthy
lives free of heart disease and cancer.
The Rendille
tribe in the Kaisut Desert in NE Kenya subsist on camel milk and
meat, and a mixture of camel milk and blood, known as “Banjo.” Their
diet is 63 percent saturated fat.
The Tokelau
live well, without cardiologists, on three atoll islands that are
now a territory of New Zealand. Their diet consists of fish
and coconuts, which is 60 percent saturated fat.
Like these
groups of people around the world, breast-fed infants in developed
first-world countries also have a diet that is high in saturated
fats. The fat in human mother's milk is 54 percent saturated fat.
The Hunter-Gatherer
Diet
The study referenced
here, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
is considered to be the most comprehensive analysis done on the
Paleolithic hunter-gather diet. Anthropologists have assessed the
diets of 229 hunter-gather populations that survived into the 20th
century and can be viewed as surrogates for our Paleolithic, Stone
Age ancestors.
When they can
get it, these modern-day hunter-gatherers consume high amounts of
animal food, which can make up to 85-100 percent of their calories,
like the Maasi, Inuit, and Rendille peoples. They eat virtually
all of the fat on the animal, including its organs, tongue, bone
marrow, and brain. Other carnivores do the same thing. Lions, for
example, will eat the organs and fat of their kill and leave the
lean muscle meat for scavengers.
Since hunter-gatherers
do not engage in agriculture, they have no corn, rice, or wheat
to eat. They obtain only a low amount of carbohydrates from wild
plants, gathering seeds, nuts, roots, tubers, bulbs, and fruits
from them.
The Human
Diet Throughout History
The Paleolithic
Era, or Stone Age, lasted two-and-a-half million years, beginning
with our human ancestor Homo hablis, and progressing through a succession
of species to ours, Homo sapiens, which has existed for some 200,000
years.
Age began approximately 10,000 years ago and during this time, through
500 generations, carbohydrate consumption gradually increased. Even
so, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago,
sugar consumption was one-fifth of what it is today. Now we are
eating a greatly increased amount of carbs in cereal grains, dairy
products, beverages, refined sugar, and candy, along with processed
vegetable oils and dressings that did not exist in our diet for
99.9 percent of human history. During this time the human genome
became adapted to follow a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Nevertheless,
health authorities today say that we should do the opposite and
follow a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
As calories,
fat and carbs are interchangeable, protein less so. One can eat
and digest only so much protein. When the protein content of the
diet exceeds 35 percent of calories, nausea, diarrhea, and weakness
ensue. These symptoms disappear when protein is dropped to 20-25
percent of calories.
on Ancel Keys
The new social
media of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is not only helping to overthrow
dictators and autocratic regimes but also wrong medical dogmas.
This one, titled Big
Fat Lies (shown at the meeting), exposes the chicanery Ancel
Keys practiced in his work (available HERE).
The Framingham
Study 30-years on
But what about
the Framingham Study? In 1987, in the Journal of the American
Medical Association Framingham Study investigators reported
these two important findings: 1) Over age 50 there is no increased
overall mortality with either high or low serum cholesterol levels,
and 2) In people with a falling cholesterol level (over the first
14 years of the study), for each 1% mg/dl drop in cholesterol there
was an 11 percent increase in all-cause mortality over the
next 18 years. (JAMA 1987;257:2176-2180)
Contrary
Long-term Findings of the Framingham Heart Study
in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the third director
of the study, Dr. William Castelli, reported: "In Framingham,
Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one
ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person's serum
cholesterol" [emphasis in original]… We found that the people
who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the
most calories, weighed the least, and were the most physically active."
(Arch Int Med 1992;152:1271-2)
Most doctors
have not heard about these findings because medical organizations,
notably the American Heart Association, government agencies, and
the pharmaceutical industry have ignored them. After all, prescribing
statin drugs to lower cholesterol is a $25 billion/year industry.
The Politics
Behind the McGovern Report
What about
our government and the McGovern Report? The YouTube video titled
"The
McGovern Report" (shown at the meeting) deals with it in
a pithy way (available HERE).
Mary Enig,
Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Maryland, is interviewed
in the video. In 1978, she was the lone whistleblower warning people
about the dangers of trans fats. The medical establishment, government,
and the food and drug industry belittled and ignored her findings
that trans fats interfere with critical enzyme systems in the body
and suppressed these findings for 25 years. As evidence of their
dangers continued to grow the FDA, finally, in 2003, announced that
beginning in 2006 the food industry must display how much trans
fat the product contains on its nutrition facts label. Having ignored
the subject since its inception in 1980, the government's 2005 Dietary
Guidelines for American at last warned them to restrict their consumption
of trans fats. In 2006 New York became the first city in the nation
to ban trans fats in restaurant food.
Saturated
Fat and Heart Disease
Evidence that
the McGovern Committee did not have in the 1970s is this 2005 report
of European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics.
They show an
inverse correlation with saturated fat consumption and rate of heart
disease. Countries with the lowest consumption of saturated
fat have the highest rates of heart disease. Georgia, Tajikistan,
Azerbaijan, Moldova, Croatia, Macedonia, and Ukraine all have a
saturated fat consumption that is less than 7.5% of calories, which
is what the USDA and American Heart Association recommend, but their
death rate from heart disease is quite high. Austria, Finland, Belgium,
Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France have high levels
of saturated fat in their diet and low rates of heart disease. France,
with the highest fat consumption, has the lowest rate of deaths
from heart disease amongst these 14 European countries.
Reasons
Why Saturated Fats Are Good For Us
The Biologic
Importance of Saturated Fat
There is good
reason why 54 percent of the fat in mother's milk is saturated fat.
Cell membranes need saturated fatty acids to function properly
and be "waterproof." The heart prefers saturated
long-chain 16-carbon palmitic and 18-C stearic acid (over carbohydrates)
for energy. Bones need them to assimilate calcium effectively.
They protect the liver from the adverse effects of alcohol
and medications like Tylenol. Lung surfactant is composed
entirely of saturated 16-C palmitic acid, and when present in sufficient
amounts prevents asthma and other breathing disorders. Saturated
fats function as signaling messengers for hormone production.
They play an
important role in the immune system by priming white blood
cells to destroy invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, and to fight
tumors. And medium-chain 12-C lauric acid and 14-C myristic acid
(in butter) kill bacteria and candida fungus.
Saturated fats
signal satiety, so you stop eating because you feel full,
lose fat, and maintain a normal weight.
And, importantly,
eating saturated fats reduces consumption of health-damaging carbohydrates
and polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Cracks in
the Wall of Diet-Cholesterol Heart Orthodoxy
The American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition is a leading establishment medical
journal that defends the lipid hypothesis. Even this journal has
backed down and is now reporting cracks in the wall of diet-cholesterol-heart
orthodoxy. A meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating
the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease does
not support the notion that saturated fats increase the risk of
coronary heart disease, stroke, or peripheral vascular disease.
And this journal
also recently published a prospective cohort study of 53,000 women
and men comparing their intake of carbohydrates and saturated fats
and found that replacement of saturated fats with high glycemic
index carbohydrates significantly increases the risk of heart attacks.
Double-Blind Trial on the Effects of Coconut Oil on Abdominal Obesity
published in the journal Lipids, enrolled 40 women with a
waist circumference > 35 inches. Twenty were randomized to take
30 ml — two tablespoons — of coconut oil a day (Group C) over a
12-week period. The other 20 took 30 ml soybean oil/day (Group S).
The Group C
women taking the coconut oil exhibited a significant reduction in
waist circumference (for the statisticians among us the P
value was 0.005) with no change in the soybean Group S. And the
only thing that the saturated fat-laden coconut oil did to cholesterol
levels was to raise HDL cholesterol, the one that advocates of the
lipid hypothesis call the "good" cholesterol. (Lipids
2009;44:593-601)
Eat Fat
Lose Fat
Dr. Mary Enig
and Sally Fallon, president of the Weston Price Foundation, have
written a book titled
Eat Fat Lose Fat: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Three Delicious,
Science-based Coconut Diets. I highly recommend it. The
fat content of coconut oil is 92 percent saturated fat, the highest
saturated fat content of any food. I now start each day with two
tablespoons of coconut oil.
Other
Considerations
Roles Cholesterol
Play
What about
cholesterol? As with saturated fat, it is not a villain. On the
contrary, cholesterol is critical for good health. It is an essential
component in every cell in the body. Although few doctors know this,
more than 20 studies have shown that elderly people with a high
cholesterol blood level live longer than do those who have a low
cholesterol blood level.
is the mother of hormones. It is converted into stress and sex hormones,
like cortisol, testosterone, and estradiol, in the adrenal cortex.
The liver turns cholesterol into bile salts needed for intestinal
absorption of fats and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K.
And when exposed to UVB rays in sunlight or at a tanning salon,
the skin turns cholesterol into vitamin D.
Cholesterol
also is the body's fire brigade. It repairs damage to the body's
tissues, particularly the damage in arteries inflammation does to
cause atherosclerosis. Blaming cholesterol for atherosclerosis is
like blaming firemen for the fire they have come to put out.
Along with
saturated fats, cholesterol is also an integral component of cell
membranes.
The brain and
nerve tissue contain the highest concentration of cholesterol in
the body. It is a key component in forming synapses — cell connections
— needed for good mental functioning, learning, and memory.
If not cholesterol,
then what causes heart disease?
Atherosclerosis
is an inflammatory process brought on by eating too many carbohydrates
and omega-6 vegetable oils. Stress plays a role and possibly also
bacterial infection.
A deficiency
of various vitamins shown here may also play a role in causing atherosclerotic
heart disease, as may an excess or deficiency of various minerals.
U.S. Dietary
Fat: Animal and Vegetable Sources 1909 and 1985
Over the past
century, butter consumption has plummeted from 18 grams per person
per day to 5 grams. Consumption of lard has dropped substantially
while use of shortening has almost tripled. In 1909, shortening
was a natural product made with coconut oil and lard. Shortening
used today is made out of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Consumption
of margarine made with trans fats has gone up five fold, and vegetable
oils, more than fifteen-fold. Along with trans fats, these often
rancid vegetable oils are new to the human diet.
A good case
can be made that these changes in fat-and-oil consumption over the
last hundred years are the major cause of the epidemic of obesity,
diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and learning disabilities
in children. Observing the increasing use of vegetable oils during
the 1940s and 1950s, a few physicians, notably Dr. Weston A. Price
and Dr. Francis Pottenger, predicted that there would be increasing
rates of such diseases.
Prevalence
of Obesity among US adults 1950-2010
An epidemic
of obesity has accompanied the adoption of a low-fat diet. With
only 1 in 150 people obese when the century began, by 1950 nearly
10 percent of Americans were obese. Thirty years later, in 1980,
it had risen to 15 percent. Then following publication of the U.S.
Dietary Guidelines and its every-five-year updates, obesity in Americans
has steadily risen. Now two-thirds of the American public is overweight,
with more than one-third, obese. Today the average American weighs
30 pounds more that he or she did 100 years ago. American women
weigh and average 167 pounds and men, 191 pounds.
There is solid
evidence that this epidemic of obesity has resulted from replacing
saturated fat in the American diet with carbohydrates and processed
polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Carbohydrate
Consumption and Obesity
The rise in
obesity parallels closely the rise in carbohydrate intake. As Gary
Taubes shows in his book Why
We Get Fat: and what to do about it, carbohydrates, not
overeating or a sedentary life, are what make you fat. Eating fat
and protein don't make us fat, only carbohydrates do.
The Primal
Blueprint Carbohydrate Curve
This graph,
in Mark Sisson's book The
Primal Blueprint, compares carbohydrate intake with weight.
Consuming less
than 150 grams of carbs a day enables one to maintain a stable weight.
More than that and you gain weight. One burns more fat and will
lose weight when carbohydrate intake is less than 100 grams a day.
Unfortunately, Americans today consume between 300-500 grams of
carbs a day.
The Epidemic
of Diabetes
Over a 30-year
period from 1980-2008 the prevalence of diabetes more than tripled.
Now, in 2011, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet, 25.8
million children and adults in the U.S., 8.3 percent of the population,
have diabetes; and 79 million people, based on their fasting glucose
and hemoglobin A1c levels, are prediabetic.
Diabesity
Diabetes and
obesity go together, so much so that these disorders are now being
called "diabesity". Body mass index (BMI) is the commonly
used measure for obesity, calculated by dividing one's weight in
kilograms (Kg) by one's height in meters squared (Kg/m2).
One is considered to be obese if the BMI ≥30, and morbidly
obese with a BMI of ≥35.
People with
a BMI ≥35 are 10 times more likely to develop diabetes in
their lifetimes than those with a normal BMI of 18.5-25. The lifetime
risk of diabetes is around 30 percent for people who are overweight
with a BMI of 25-30, 50 percent for obese people with a BMI of 30-35,
and around 70 percent for people who are morbidly obese.
Disease
Trends and Butter Consumption
Consumption
of butter has dropped precipitously while cancer and heart disease
has soared. The rise in cancer and heart disease certainly cannot
be blamed on high-saturated-fat butter.
The Health-Damaging
Effects of a Low-Fat, High-Carbohydrate Diet
These books
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that today's chronic diseases, such
as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are nutritional diseases,
a result of eating a low-fat (mainly polyunsaturated vegetable oil),
high-carbohydrate diet. Alice and Fred Ottoboni wrote Modern
Nutritional Diseases: heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, obesity,
cancer, and how to prevent them; Barry Groves, Trick
and Treat: how healthy eating is making us ill; and Zoë
Harcombe, The
Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it?, Barry
Groves, in particular, citing more than 1,000 references, documents
how so-called "healthy" eating is making us ill.
Liquid Candy
A 12-ounce
can of coke has ten teaspoons of sugar, which contain 42 grams of
sugar, supplying 167 calories. A 20 ounce bottle has 17, and a 30
ounce bottle, 27 teaspoons of sugar. The average American drinks
600 cans (56 gallons) of soft drinks a year, up from 216 can in
1971. The average American teenager drinks 3 to 6 cans of soda a
day!
One-third of
our dietary sugar comes from sodas, and they have become America's
number one source of calories.
Disasters
Disasters that
may confront us can be divided into ones that are natural and those
that are human made. The natural ones range from an earthquake to
an impact event, like the one 65 million years ago where an asteroid
six miles in diameter collided with the earth and wiped out the
dinosaurs, and all other life forms larger than a small chicken.
Human-made
disasters include political, economic, and martial types, a number
of which Doctors for Disaster Preparedness has addressed. To this
list must be added the nutritional disaster of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate
diet.
Weapons
of Mass Destruction
These trucks
laden with soda pop serve as its weapons of mass destruction.
Health Benefits
of a Low-Carbohydrate, High-Saturated Fat Diet
In addition
to Eat
Fat, Lose Fat, I recommend two more books that can help
us reduce our carbohydrate intake. One is Life
Without Bread: how a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life.
It describes diets that limit carbohydrate intake to 72 grams
a day, which is equivalent to 6 slices of bread. The other one is
Why
We Get Fat: and what to do about it by Gary Taubes. Noting
that meat, fish, and eggs contain no carbohydrates, he suggests
that you can eat as much of them as you like, along with leafy green
vegetables. (Try chicken salad wrapped in lettuce rather than as
a sandwich between two slices of bread.)
The ideal caloric
ratio between carbohydrates, fats, and protein is carbohydrates,
10-15 percent; proteins, 15-25 percent; and fats, 60-70 percent
of calories, with the majority of them being saturated fats. Among
the different kinds of fats, saturated fats and monounsaturated
fats are good; except for omega-3 and a small amount of omega-6
essential fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats are bad in the
high quantities that they are eaten in a Western diet, particularly
industrially processed vegetable oils; and trans fats are terrible.
Saturated animal fat is best obtained from grass-fed beef and pastured
chickens, along with nitrate-free, additive-free bacon and sausage;
and seafood from wild, not farm-raised, fish.
The Sacred
Cow
Healthy milk
and meat comes from contented cows on pasture, eating grass food
that they are genetically designed to eat.
The "Efficient"
Industrial Confinement Model
Confinement
operations like these produce meat that is too high in omega-6 polyunsaturated
fat and too low in vitamins. It being certified "organic"
is not sufficient. The turkeys in the photo in the lower left can
be sold as organic because they are "cage free"! The best
meat to eat is that which is "Certified humanely treated"
or "100% grass-fed/finished."
The Pastured
Poultry Model
Pastured poultry
produce eggs much richer in nutrients such as vitamins A and D and
omega-3 fatty acids. Like with the turkeys so confined, organic
eggs are produced mainly in barns. One wants to eat pastured eggs
like those sold at a farmer's market.
Three types
of eggs
The color of
the yolk is an indication of the presence of nutrients. The pastured
egg, with its dark orange color, is full of nutrients. The organic
store egg less so. The supermarket egg, pale as it is, would be
even whiter if the chickens weren't fed orange foods and dyes.
Confinement
Butter vs. Grass-Fed Butter
The butter
on the right was made from cream from cows on green pasture. The
deep yellow color is indicative of high levels of omega-3 fats and
fat-soluble vitamins. The butter on the left was made with cream
from confined cows. Commercial butter like this has artificial color
added to it so the consumer will not know that it is actually colorless.
Conclusion
Enjoy eating
saturated fat but preferably from grass-fed animals.
For further
reading on this subject, I recommend two articles, which are available
online. One is the article that prompted me to question the lipid
hypothesis. The second one is my now more enlightened view on this
subject.
I did a podcast
on the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat
diet on the Livin La Vida Low Carb Show. The show's host, Jimmy
Moore, has titled it, "Cardiac Surgeon Dr. Donald Miller Tells
Dr. Dean Ornish to Take a Hike." A link to it is HERE
(and on my website).
For those of
you who would like to delve further into this subject, I highly
recommend these two books written by a cardiologist, Dr. Ravnskov,
Fat
and Cholesterol are GOOD for You, published in 2009, and
Ignore
the Awkward! How the Cholesterol Myths are Kept Alive, published
last year. These two books are a must read for anyone taking statins
to lower their cholesterol.
Supporters
of the orthodox view that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart
disease who dismiss these books, unread, bring to mind George Orwell's
definition of orthodoxy: "Orthodoxy means not thinking, not
needing to think." And Frank Zappa put it well when he said,
"The mind is like a parachute, it works only when it is open."
One needs to approach this subject with an open mind.
Julia Child's
view on the matter
The last word
on this subject should go to Julia Child. It is on YouTube
(shown at the meeting) under the title, 1995
Clip: Julia Child on McDonald’s French Fries (available
HERE).
Enjoy eating
saturated fats, they're good for you!
July 19, 2011
Donald
Miller
(send him mail)
is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University
of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety
of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com
The
Best of Donald Miller
The Best of Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/donald-w-miller-jr-md/saturated-fats-are-good-for-you/
