This article from Sott.net, by  Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD    LewRockwell.com , is the best comprehensive article on fats and related health issues I recall ever reading.

I consider it to be most impressive and well worth the reading of the whole article. All of the relevant subjects are mentioned in an easy to understand and educational way.

It is suggested that much of the current theory and practice in the cardiovascular health arena has not kept up with new findings and is, to some extent, based on imperfect research and reporting.

I would be grateful if any qualified medical professional, particularly a cardiac specialist, would comment on the credibility of the information.

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.

In 1911, Procter 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.

Evidence 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

Switch to the source article here, or,

Continue reading →