The Big Fat Lie
“Here, then, was the new reality: A political decision had yielded a new scientific truth. Contrary to the normal scientific method, which requires that a hypothesis be tested before it can be considered viable, in this case politics short-circuited the process, and an untested hypothesis was elevated as the reigning doctrine, presumed to be right until proven wrong.”
This quote seems relevant today, but is taken from an incredible book called “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz that was released back in 2014 (linked here). She was speaking of the overwhelming media and government support in the not-so-distant past of the idea that eating less saturated fat and cholesterol would dramatically reduce or even eliminate heart disease, an idea that was based more on passions and feelings rather than on science.
Indeed, a man named Ancel Keys who developed the theory in the early 1950s convinced himself and others that fat must clog up our arteries like grease would a pipe. He then, through immense personal tenacity and cunning thrust his idea upon the entire world, and by 1961 he had infiltrated the American Heart Association (AHA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and landed a cover on one of the most influential publications of the day, Time magazine. Because of his and his followers’ influence, by the 1970s even Congress was intervening and recommending to Americans what to eat, and by that point, as what always happens when government gets involved, all hope of self-correcting the careening train off the slope was gone.
“When Congress adopted the diet-heart hypothesis, the idea gained ascendancy as an all-ruling, unassailable dogma, and from this point on, there has been virtually no turning back.”
To read more about this fascinating and disheartening story, I highly recommend you read Nina’s book in its entirety (available here). It will seem strangely prophetic, but should also make you extremely frustrated. Because even though Nina’s book hasn’t been the only one to shed light on this story (actually it is one of many), it seems the medical establishment still insists on repeating the same Big Fat Lie over and over to you, your family and your friends. How many times have you used or heard the phrase “clogs your arteries”? Here is the truth:
Natural fats and cholesterol DO NOT cause heart disease.
AND
Total cholesterol numbers give NO INDICATION of heart disease risk.
Consider these points from Nina’s book:
The only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard, suet, tallow, butter, and cream
Oils weren’t considered edible and didn’t belong in the kitchen
For the first 250 years of American history, even the poor could afford meat or fish at every meal, and the food included beef, veal, mutton, venison, turkey and geese
Early Americans appeared to eat few vegetables
Americans relished the viscera of the animal, eating the heart, kidney, tripe, glands, liver, lungs, heads, feet and tongue
Americans in the nineteenth century ate saturated fats of every kind, four to five times more butter and six times more lard than we do today
Based on research, an average annual consumption in the nineteenth century is suggested of 150-200 pounds of meat per person
Wow, that is a lot of meat and fat! So where are the cases of heart disease during this time? Very hard to find. Nina mentions that reports from the 1800s of doctors of very large and busy practices in large cities show practically no cases. Having a heart attack is not something you can hide, nor let go undiagnosed. And there were plenty of people over the age of 50, approximately ten million or so Americans, all at the prime age for a heart attack. But no, their primary complaints of pain during that time were gout and migraine, not chest pain. It was not until the 1900s that heart disease began its rampant rise in our population.
Natural fats and cholesterol DO NOT cause heart disease. Thousands of years of human history, not just American history, display this truth, and there are many examples in Nina’s book.
So what happened? As the United States grew in prosperity and population, American businesses began trying ways to cheapen the manufacturing of fat, which was at the time a very labor-intensive process. How did they do that? By adding newly created VEGETABLE OILS. And once Keys had succeeded in convincing the AHA (along with food manufacturers) to endorse vegetable oils as healthy, there was no stopping their lethal integration.
Consider these points from Nina’s book:
American companies began mixing cottonseed oil with beef fat to make a cheaper “compound lard” in the late 1890s
Manufacturers also then began sneaking cottonseed oil into butter as a way of reducing costs
What we know as “vegetable oils” are all pressed from seeds, and leftover cottonseed oil from the Southern cotton plantations was in great supply
The first clinical description of coronary thrombosis came in 1912
Fat consumption increased 12 percent from 1909 to 1961, but was not due to a rise in animal fat, but vegetable oils, which had recently been invented
The American Heart Association received millions of dollars in support from the food companies that manufactured these oils
The name Crisco comes from its chief ingredient, crystallized cottonseed oil, a substance originally invented to make cheap soap, but became the product that introduced hydrogenated oil containing trans-fatty acids into the American food supply
By the early 1960s, consumers were advised to replace butter with margarine or Crisco and always to choose vegetable fats over animal fats as part of a healthy, prudent diet
The great progress of our nation backfired on its people. Going through a depression and two world wars and watching our government seem to be able to bend the will of the entire world caused Americans to become dangerously trusting of whatever they said. It caused them to naively assume that whatever American businesses were doing were only for their good and for the progress of our nation.
There were scientists and doctors and researchers who sounded the warning bells. Those who tried to steer us back on course. Many who tried in vain to point to the illogical fallacy of our path. But they were ignored, outcast, left unpublished in journals and uninvited to conferences for DARING to oppose the dogma of the day.
By 1984, the last nails in the coffin were hammered in, when an NIH Consensus Conference “enshrined the idea that saturated fat causes heart disease,” Time magazine declared “Cholesterol is proved deadly,” and the National Cholesterol Education Program was spawned, giving pharmaceutical companies easy lobbying access to support more drugs and even lower cholesterol numbers to the public.
“And the low-fat diet, even though it had never been properly tested in a clinical trial to ascertain whether it could prevent heart disease, became the standard, recommended diet of the land.”
Thankfully, in 2021 you will rarely hear anyone recommend a low-fat diet, and it is largely considered debunked. Eggs, butter and cheese are now welcomed back in many homes. But many in our population are still scared of red meat and are convinced that too much saturated fat will kill them. Cans of Crisco are still sitting on shelves in our grandparents’ homes. Our government still has not adequately raised the saturated fat levels that it recommends for our population, which affects millions every year, especially the most vulnerable. And, you will still have cardiologists and other doctors recommending statins to lower cholesterol numbers. The Big Fat Lie persists.
Even worse than that, the damage done by this long-pervasive theory has unfortunately infiltrated every aspect of our lives, mainly through the remaining insidious presence of vegetable oils in virtually every product on our shelves, even in “natural” grocery stores, and used in practically every restaurant world-wide.
So what is so bad about vegetable (seed) oils? Are polyunsaturated fats so terrible for us?
As it turns out, they may be the single most effective driver of disease the world has ever seen.
And I am not exaggerating.
We’ll explore this further, so stay tuned.