From my book https://www.howtolivethehealthiestlife.com
Fats and Oils
The writer and social critic H.L. Mencken once wrote, “For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong.”
Lie: A high fat diet is bad for you, cutting back on fats will help you lose weight and reduce risk of cardiovascular disease.
Truth: Healthy fats are essential, a reduced carbohydrate intake will lose fat easier than a reduced fat intake.
Truth: “In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people’s serum cholesterol… we found that the people who ate the most saturated fat weighed the least and were the most physically active.” (William Castelli, director of The Framingham Study).
Truth: “The diet-heart hypothesis had been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund raising enterprises, food companies and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.” (George Mann, MD, renowned researcher).
Truth: More Americans die each year from too little fat than die from breast cancer. An estimated 40,000 US women die each year from breast cancer and according to a recent Harvard study, 72,000-96,000 people a year are dying from too little omega 3 fatty acids in their diets.
The facts proclaim loudly that “low fat” is a scam/con/lie. It began with a Russian study in 1908 that fed protein-rich animal foods to rabbits who developed arterial plaques and cardiovascular disease. Researchers then found the same results with chickens, pigs, goats and guinea pigs.
All of these animals are herbivores that evolved eating nothing but plants. They are clearly not designed to eat meat. When fed meat and fat they get sick. That makes perfect sense. That data was then inappropriately extrapolated to humans.
The “fat is bad” lie really began to pick up traction with a 1976 Senate report, titled “Dietary Goals for the United States”. It was written by a journalist with no background in health, who was advised by a Harvard nutritionist who viewed dietary fat as the nutritional equivalent of smoking cigarettes. Very quickly taken up by many health organisations was the simple, if untrue, mantra, “eating fat makes you fat” and they promoted that a low fat diet was the way to prevent disease.
It was thoroughly debunked by 4 independent studies in the early 80’s which found that men on low or high fat diets had no change in weight or coronary risk. Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard is considered by many to be the dean of nutrition and health studies. He states, “the percentage of calories from fat in a diet has not been related to any important health outcome.”
Low fat is continuously promoted by Big Food because it is cheaper to replace with sugar the taste lost when they took out the fat. So we have blooming weight and diabetes problems from increasing consumption of high-fructose corn syrup or cane sugar rather than healthy coconut oil.
The rate of obesity in the US between the 1900’s and the 1960’s was stable at 12-14% of the population. Within 5 years of the “fat is bad” message hitting the press the obesity rate was 20%. Today it is over 25%! Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese.
Despite everything you’ve been told, all fats are not bad. There are good and bad fats. Good fats are an essential part of a proper diet, bad fats are deadly. The brain particularly needs fat in the diet.
Some good fats are fatty fish like wild salmon, grass fed meat fat, butter, lard, dripping, coconut oil, the oils in nuts, linseed and chia seeds.
Some bad fats are trans fats – hydrogenated vegetable oils, canola etc. and their replacement, intersterified fats. Oils are typically not very stable, they destabilise and go rancid quickly. To solidify them and extend the shelf life of commercial oils, processors add hydrogen. This makes them a trans fat. In a 26 year survey of 87,000 US women, of the group with an underlying coronary heart disease, those who ate the most trans fats were three times as likely to die of a cardiac arrest.
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“When you consume these subpar fats, your cell walls also become subpar. Instead of being flexible and responsive to intercellular communication, cell walls become stiff and rigid. The more rigid the walls, the slower the cell functions and more vulnerable it becomes to inflammation…