Death By Supermarket (16 page)

Over the course of fifty years, medical doctors have given Americans devastating nutritional advice about fats. This advice has encouraged Americans to eschew the historical human diet of real fat in favor of highly industrialized fats. Much of this advice was based on the results of studies.

There are many problems with studies. For one, it’s only with absolutes that you can even begin to approach an absolute conclusion. The variables
of human experience, genetics, and behavior automatically render results of human trials inconclusive, even if your test subjects were selected from a pool of virtually identical individuals, either male or female, sharing the same race, height, weight, dietary and exercise history, sleep patterns, cigarette and alcohol use, baseline cholesterol numbers, prescription and OTC medication use, sex lives, TV habits, golf scores, and number of children (alive and dead). You would still have to have a team of unbiased scientists from another planet examine the results because, again, human beings are flawed, and when they want to prove something they will go to nearly any length. When a researcher sets out to prove a hypothesis, he or she is looking for that proof of that hypothesis in the results of whatever study he or she conducts. Research protocols are not perfect, and data can be juggled or ignored, corners cut, and so on, so that a researcher is likely to get the results he or she is looking for, especially if they stand to make money from any ventures that rely on a hypothesis being correct. And scientists and doctors who have spent their entire careers hyping a hypothesis and perhaps have lucrative clinics, books, and other products based on this premise are not likely to back down from their original position.

I’ve cited studies throughout this book, but it’s my opinion that nutritional studies should always be weighed against empirical evidence because there are just too many problems with studies. Again, most studies are paid for by the industries that stand to profit by the results of the studies. For example, over the past twenty years, soy symposiums where researchers present their findings have been funded by multi-billion-dollar soy-producing corporations and associations, including the Archer Daniels Midland Company, Monsanto, the Central Soya Company, the United Soybean Board, Cargill Soy Protein Products/Cargill Nutraceuticals, and the Illinois Soybean Association. Many of the studies presented are made possible by grants from these and other soy-producing corporations.

And it’s not just the soy industry. Most scientists rely on funding from industries to do research. If they don’t cooperate (i.e., provide research
results that are consistent with the views of their benefactors), they have their funding (salaries) cut off.

Another problem with studies is that few doctors bother to read them. If they do, they most likely read the abstract, which is not as comprehensive as the body of the article. Ask your doctor why he or she supports avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol, eating soy, eating a low fat diet, taking statin drugs, or any other conventionally accepted doctrine that’s floated today and he or she will likely say because of studies. OK, exactly what studies do you mean? I would venture to say that few doctors could legitimately say that they poured over the medical literature and analyzed the results of the pros and cons of the views they support.

At the same time, since the introduction of processed polyunsaturated fats there have been medical doctors and scientists who chose to stray from the status quo in search of deeper answers into the mysterious rise in heart disease.

IN JULY 1971,
Senator George McGovern (D-SD) announced the formation of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which would hold hearings on the relationship between diet and heart disease—and whose purpose was to prove that eating dietary saturated fat was as bad as cigarette smoking. McGovern declared that he would hear testimony only from those on the side of polyunsaturated vegetable oils. He didn’t want to hear any testimony from scientists or representatives from the dairy and meat industries, who wanted to argue that eating meat, dairy products, and eggs might not be a contributing factor in heart disease.

Numerous scientists voiced skepticism and wanted to present opposing scientific papers and to encourage further discussion as to the real cause of heart disease. Nevertheless, it was ultimately McGovern’s committee that, by 1977—having come to nowhere near unanimous conclusions—solidified the lipid hypothesis as official policy with the issuing of the USDA’s mandate to eat less fat.

In May 1978, Mary Enig, then a biochemistry doctoral student at the University of Maryland, was scratching her head over the McGovern report. The committee had reached their conclusions in part because of their assumptions that the increased consumption of animal fats had
caused the rise in heart disease. But Enig knew that the consumption of animal fats had declined steadily, while polyunsaturated vegetable fat intake had increased. In addition, Enig was aware of numerous studies that contradicted the committee’s conclusions regarding the correlation between fat intake and breast and colon cancers. She poured over the USDA data that McGovern’s committee had used and, when she finished her analysis, submitted her findings to
The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
.
¹⁶⁰

Enig’s article claimed that the McGovern report had it all wrong about the correlation between dietary fat and cancer. She offered up data that demonstrated that the use of hydrogenated polyunsaturated vegetable oils predisposed consumers to cancer, but that animal fats provided protection against cancer. She claimed that the McGovern committee’s analysts manipulated the data to get the results they wanted. Her article urged immediate investigation into the dangers of trans-fatty acids.

By the time Dr. Enig had reached her initial conclusions all those decades ago about saturated fats and trans fats, other researchers also understood the problems. Scientists continued to demonstrate that there was virtually no correlation between animal fat and other cholesterol-laden food intake and blood cholesterol.
¹⁶¹
Many studies concluded that thickening of the arterial walls is simply a natural, unavoidable process that has nothing to do with eating saturated fat and cholesterol.
¹⁶²
Numerous scientists were also recognizing that total cholesterol numbers are meaningless. People with low cholesterol are more likely to have blocked arteries than those with high cholesterol.
¹⁶³

Mary Enig and her fellow researchers at the University of Maryland clocked thousands of hours in the lab analyzing the trans-fat content of hundreds of factory foods. The researchers found that shortenings used in cookies, chips, and baked goods contained more than 35 percent trans fat and that many baked goods and industrialized foods contained much more partially hydrogenated vegetable oil than their labels disclosed. Enig’s analyses confirmed that (at that time) the average American consumed at
least 12 grams of trans fat per day. (Today Americans eat an average of 6 grams of trans fats per day.)
¹⁶⁴

Enig’s research concluded that trans fats interfere with the enzymes that neutralize carcinogens while increasing the enzymes that exacerbate the damage of carcinogens. Trans fats also increase (the so-called bad) LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, and lower (the so-called good) HDL cholesterol. Trans fats make blood platelets sticky, interfere with insulin actions, cause aberrant cellular structures, create free radicals, and lower immune response. These factors contribute to the development of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Trans-fatty acids lower cream volume in breast milk, and are linked to low birth weight; in men they decrease testosterone and increase levels of abnormal sperm, and in women they can shorten gestation.
¹⁶⁵

Trans fats also have a deleterious effect on the brain and nervous system. The human body doesn’t reject trans-fatty acids as foreign but uses whatever fat it has on board to build cellular structures. And because trans fats can cross the blood-brain barrier, they are incorporated into brain cell membranes and are thus linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as childhood neurological disorders such as ADD, ADHD, and autism.

Although Dr. Enig and other researchers came to these dire conclusions about trans fats, their findings were drowned out by the overwhelming support for the lipid hypothesis, which essentially diverted attention away from the dangers of trans fats and encouraged Americans to eat more factory-polyunsaturated fats. Because our medical and scientific community had endorsed polyunsaturated vegetable fats as heart healthy, promoters had already permeated our food chain with hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats (containing trans fats).

Since her early years as a graduate student, Dr. Enig has been a driving force in compelling the FDA to enforce the labeling of trans fats on products, which went into law on January 1, 2006. It is because of Dr. Enig that we are now aware of the dangers of trans fats. It’s a telling commentary
that although Dr. Enig has achieved some acclaim in the alternative health world for her efforts and contributions to Americans’ well-being, she has nowhere near the household name status of Betty Crocker, that fictional character who has been used for decades to give science-fiction factory-foods a warm and fuzzy image.

It’s highly likely that many food makers will continue to produce trans fat products—and that people will continue to consume those products. Even if labeling trans fats on products and banning trans fats in restaurants does make a small difference, this does nothing to hinder the marketing and sales of heat- and chemical-processed polyunsaturated vegetable fats that are just as much to blame for the epidemic of heart and other diseases.

Adding to consumer confusion is the fact that the medical industry and the government continue to categorize saturated fat together with trans fats as dangerous fats to avoid.

The truth may surprise you.

WHEN I WAS 17,
in 1967, I read
The Jungle
(1905), Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the grisly and unhygienic conditions in the meatpacking industry. I felt reassured that public uproar after the publication of the novel had led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and other food-safety legislation, which I naively assumed had reformed the medieval slaughtering practices in the meatpacking industry. But thirty-eight years later, when I read Bob Dylan’s memoir,
Chronicles, Volume One
, I was stopped cold. In 1961, Dylan migrated to New York City. He talks about a friend who had worked on the kill floor of an Omaha slaughterhouse. Dylan asked his friend what it was like, and he replied, “You ever heard of Auschwitz?”
¹⁶⁶

So why is it that we spend multi billions of dollars per year pampering our cats and dogs, and though we revile the imprisonment, torture, and brutal killing of innocent people, we accept the same treatment for the innocent animals that give us sustenance? As John Robbins explained in
Diet for a New America
(1987), all aspects of animal husbandry have taken a draconian turn in the last hundred years, as the food industry has operated with single-minded focus on one goal and one goal only: to save money. This means fattening up animals as cheaply as possible in as small a space as possible.

Although we may be able to compartmentalize our guilt over animal cruelty so we can continue to consume factory milk, meat, and eggs, ultimately the animals’ horrible existence, garbage diet, drug intake, and gory
deaths will come back to haunt us. The way an animal lives and its diet determines the nutritional value of its meat, milk, and eggs and, thus the consumers’ subsequent health. It also explains why factory-raised saturated fat is almost as unhealthy as trans fat.

Factory animals are tethered, stalled, or otherwise tightly confined in dark factories or pens. They stand in their own waste and often drink water contaminated with, or are fed, their own or other animals’ offal.
¹⁶⁷
To save money on feed, animals are fed municipal garbage, stale cookies, poultry “litter,” chicken feathers, and restaurant plate waste.
¹⁶⁸
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), along with species-inappropriate feed, breed disease. (Species-inappropriate feed is composed of substances that the animal would not naturally eat and is not designed to digest and assimilate in a healthy way.) To treat these diseases, animals are given numerous drugs. According to cancer expert Dr. Samuel Epstein, “In the absence of effective federal regulation, the meat industry uses hundreds of animal feed additives, including antibiotics, tranquilizers, pesticides, animal drugs, artificial flavors, industrial wastes and growth-promoting hormones… The hazards of U.S. meat have retrogressed from the random fecal and bacterial contamination of Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
to the brave new world of deliberate chemicalization.”
¹⁶⁹
It’s not just the drugs and chemicals that animals are exposed to while living that we need to be concerned with. In a desperate attempt to prevent this meat from killing people it is routinely subjected to sanitizing processes, so CAFO meats also contain dangerous preservatives and disinfectants. Carcinogen and liver-damaging formaldehyde is used illegally to control bacterial growth on meat surfaces. Sodium tetraborate (used in Borax) is also used illegally in meat mixes. Chlorine, a known carcinogen, is used for microbial control of water in spin chillers in poultry slaughter. Hydrogen peroxide is used for bleaching cattle stomachs (tripes).
¹⁷⁰
To kill
E. coli
and
Salmonella
, fatty slaughterhouse trimmings are liquefied in a centrifuge to extract the protein from the trimmings, blasted with ammonia gas, then flash frozen, producing a product referred
to as “prime slime.” This meat is routinely used in fast-food hamburgers, sold in grocery chains, and served in federal school programs.
¹⁷¹