Death By Supermarket (17 page)

Although conventional wisdom is stuck on the belief that saturated fats are as unhealthy as trans fats, saturated fats and trans fats do not necessarily belong in the same sentence. Organically raised animal fat is a naturally occurring, historically eaten fatty acid with health-giving properties. Factory animal fat is almost as deadly as trans fats, but for a different reason: Because many toxins are fat-soluble, they permeate and are stored indefinitely in fat cells. When you eat factory-produced animal products, you are eating all the toxins that an animal consumed or was exposed to. Most trans-fatty acids are man-made aberrant molecules that destroy life. (There are naturally occurring trans fats in foods.) Because free radical oxidation generated by toxins is just as much a cause of heart disease as trans fats, you can say “factory-raised saturated animal fat and trans fat” in the same breath.

However, the medical community does not recognize the distinctions between organically raised saturated animal fat, factory-raised saturated animal fat, and man-made trans fats, and therefore continues to summarily campaign against “saturated fat and trans fat.” (The uproar over trans fats has died down enough so that food makers can continue to add it to their products, listing partially hydrogenated fat in the fine print, and many consumers remain unaware.)

Historically, humans ate fat from organically raised animals in foods like butter, whole milk, cream, eggs, and meat. It’s only been since World War II that saturated animal fats have been shunned by the medical community as a factor contributing to heart disease. But over the years, like Dr. Enig others questioned the campaign against animal fat. In the early 1960s, George V. Mann, Sc.D., M.D., Ph.D.—just as Dr. Weston Price did before him—took a team of researchers to Kenya to study the Maasai tribe, who virtually lived on milk, animal blood, and meat, and found that they did not suffer from heart disease.

Dr. Mann was a participating researcher in the most famous study of the causes of heart disease, the Framingham Heart Study.
¹⁷²
This study has found no conclusive evidence that dietary fat contributes to heart disease. Dr. Mann said, “The diet-heart hypothesis has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fundraising enterprises, food companies, and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.”
¹⁷³

During the mid-1980s you would have thought eggs were the spawn of Satan, but my grandma continued to refer to eggs as the perfect food. When I asked, “But Grandma, what about heart disease?” she replied in her Polish accent, “I don’t know about that, honey” and fixed me a plate of eggs. She wasn’t alone in her belief, because somewhere deep in our collective consciousness, Americans understood that eggs are a perfect food. Still the food industry tried hard to convince us—by using studies—that real eggs were bad for our health, but that weird science egg-like products out of a carton were healthy. And the condemnation of naturally occurring saturated fats is entrenched in our mind-set. For example, in
The South Beach Diet
, celebrity cardiologist cum diet doctor Arthur Agatston writes, “There is evidence now that immediately following a meal of saturated fats, there is dysfunction in the arteries, including those that supply the heart muscle with blood. As a result, the lining of the arteries (the endothelium) is predisposed to constriction and clotting. Imagine: Under the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances, eating a meal that’s high in saturated fat can trigger a heart attack!”
¹⁷⁴

I contacted Dr. Agatston’s office to obtain the study he used as “evidence” that “eating a meal that’s high in saturated fat can trigger a heart attack.” As it turns out, the study, “Effect of Single High Fat Meal on Endothelial Function in Healthy Subject,” was published in the
American Journal of Cardiology
in 1997.
¹⁷⁵
In this study one group was given a “high fat” meal of an Egg McMuffin, Sausage McMuffin, two hash-brown patties, and a noncaffeinated beverage (something from McDonald’s). The other group
was fed the “low fat” meal, which consisted of Frosted Flakes, skimmed milk, and orange juice.

I asked Dr. Enig for her opinion, and she explained that the subjects were tested for “endothelial function” by measuring the diameter change in the brachial artery after eating. Apparently there was a slight diameter change in the brachial arteries of the “high fat”-eating test subjects. However, Dr. Enig said, “For years we have been hearing that high fat foods raise so-called bad LDL cholesterol and blood pressure and therefore contribute to heart disease. But since that didn’t happen in this study, the authors have declared that an inherently subjective measurement of ‘endothelial function’ is a better marker for heart disease. But was it saturated fat that caused the decline in endothelial function? Only 28 percent of the fat in the high fat meal was saturated. The rest was a combination of trans fats, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fat, any one of which or all together are the likely culprits in the decline in endothelial function.” Dr. Enig explained that the high sugar meal did not likely contain MSG, whereas the high fat meal did contain MSG and that the presence of MSG also explained the decline in endothelial function.

To make the incendiary claim that saturated fat can trigger a heart attack, the researchers should have been able to cite other studies, said Enig. “As it becomes more and more obvious that cholesterol levels have little predictive value for heart disease—and that saturated fats in fact have little or no effect on cholesterol levels anyway—researchers are searching for other ways to demonize saturated fats.”
¹⁷⁶

The lipid hypothesis, which has driven many Americans to fear eating saturated fats, has never been proven. In 1988 the U.S. Surgeon General’s office embarked on a project to write the “final and definitive” report that would once and for all put any questions about the lipid hypothesis to rest. The plan was to gather all supporting evidence, have it bound nicely, have the requisite experts review it, and then publish it with pomp and circumstance. Unfortunately, the plan didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated. After eleven years of active pursuit that consumed four project officers, no clear
evidence could be found to prove the lipid hypothesis. The office killed the report without the pageantry.
¹⁷⁷

“The operative word is hypothesis,” Dr. Kritchevsky told me. “The lipid hypothesis was a viable hypothesis until we learned more. The real sin here is that people [working in the field] who knew we were learning more wouldn’t admit it because they were so comfortable with what was going on.” (In other words, many researchers were receiving grants from the edible oil industry.)

The balanced diet that I’m talking about in this book—which will allow you to realize your genetic gifts—is comprised of the four basic food groups: protein, fats, nonstarchy vegetables, and carbohydrates. After protein, real, naturally occurring dietary fat is most important. Fatty acids make up 80 percent of our cellular structure and 60 percent of our brain. Fats are used to make neurotransmitters. Every cell membrane in your body is made up of fat. If you do not eat quality fats, your cells cannot function properly. Fats and cholesterol are used to make the hormones used by your endocrine system.

Fats slow down the absorption of food, so that you feel satisfied and can go for longer periods of time without feeling hunger. In fact, it’s been our suppression of natural fats in our diet that has greatly contributed to our national unnatural hunger. “Suppression of natural appetites, such as eating processed fats instead of natural fats, leads to weird nocturnal habits, fantasies, fetishes, bingeing, and splurging,” said Dr. Enig.
¹⁷⁸

Fats transport fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K in your system and are necessary for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption, and for numerous metabolic processes. The antioxidant vitamins E, A, and D can’t be absorbed into your bloodstream without the presence of fat in your intestines. That means that, in terms of antioxidants, which scavenge the free radicals that cause oxidation, all those dry salads we ate were for naught.

Eating a variety of fats every day is important because saturated,
monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fatty acids all provide different biological properties for the smooth operation of our metabolic processes.

Saturated fats provide energy for locomotion and metabolic processes and are the building blocks for cell membranes and hormones. Saturated fats strengthen your immune system, suppress production of tumors, and are necessary for your body to utilize essential fatty acids. Saturated animal fats from the meat and milk of pasture-raised, grass-fed animals contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which has been shown to reduce the risk of atherosclerosis and cancer, and has the added benefit of increasing metabolic rate and burning fat. Saturated fats in organic animal products also contain enzymes (see
page 147
).

Saturated animal fat was not the only saturated fat to take a hit because of the lipid hypothesis. In the mid-1980s, the American Soybean Association (ASA), eager to increase the sales of soybean oil, sent “Fat Fighter Kits” to soybean farmers instructing them to lobby their elected officials about the dangers of tropical oils (palm, palm kernel, and coconut oil). Behind-the-scenes work by the ASA resulted in coconut oil being characterized as “poisoning America.” An advertisement actually depicted a coconut as a bomb with a lighted fuse. Restaurants and factory-food manufacturers switched from healthy coconut oil to heat-and chemical-processed and hydrogenated soybean oil, and movie theaters switched from popping popcorn in “artery-clogging saturated” coconut oil to hydrogenated soybean oil, the deadliest oil on the market.
¹⁷⁹

Dr. Michael Eades told me, “Saturated fat, like coconut oil, has been vilified as ‘artery-clogging,’ but it’s simply untrue. Polyunsaturated fats are easily oxidized and so we can say that they are, indeed ‘artery-clogging.’ But saturated fat doesn’t easily oxidize so it doesn’t collect in the arteries.”

In
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
, Laurence Bergreen writes of Magellan’s sixteenth-century armada encountering tribes of healthy, beautiful, intelligent, fertile, coconut-eating Pacific islanders during their voyage. Bergreen writes of Magellan’s
reaction to the Philippine archipelago, “Perhaps they had found paradise… Each day Magellan fed coconut milk supplied by the generous Filipinos to the sailors still suffering from scurvy.” With reverence, the expedition’s chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s quill scratched out a description of the
cocho
(coconut) for all posterity to read. Bergreen writes that, “Pigafetta was so moved by the coconut’s versatility that he declared, with some exaggeration, that two palm trees could sustain a family of ten for a hundred years.”
¹⁸⁰

You have to wonder, if Pacific islanders historically ate coconuts, coconuts, and more coconuts, why then were they so breathtakingly healthy? Hawaiian islanders historically fit that same description and only became rotund and diseased after they eschewed their traditional diet—containing coconuts—and adopted the Westernized factory-food diet, including factory-processed vegetable oils.
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Coconut oil raises HDL cholesterol. It also contains antiviral and antimicrobial properties that have been found to be effective in combating viruses that cause influenza, measles, herpes, mononucleosis, hepatitis C, and AIDS; the fungi and yeast that result in ringworm, Candida, and thrush; parasites that cause intestinal infections, such as giardiasis; as well as bacteria that cause stomach ulcers, throat infections, pneumonia, sinusitis, rheumatic fever, food-borne illnesses, urinary tract infections, meningitis, gonorrhea, and toxic shock syndrome. No wonder Magellan’s scurvy-suffering sailors indulged in coconut. Coconut oil is also thermogenic (fat burning—thus the body beautiful South Sea islanders). According to Dr. Enig, since allergies to coconut are caused by coconut proteins, coconut oil is probably safe for those who are allergic.
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A study in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
in May 2010 demonstrated that vitamin D
₃
is more effective in preventing flu than vaccines and antivirals.
¹⁸³
In addition to Dr. Price’s ten years of research on the benefits of fats such as whole, natural milk, there are numerous studies that prove the nutritional benefits of organic, raw, grass-fed milk, including those associated with vitamin D
₃
.
¹⁸⁴
Natural vitamin D
₃
prevents autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and prevents osteoporosis.
¹⁸⁵
Natural vitamin D
₃
is also linked to improvement in mood and relief of symptoms of depression. Vitamin D
₃
also modulates neuromuscular and immune function, reduces inflammation, and is necessary for bone growth and bone remodeling. Research has demonstrated that there is a seasonal correlation between Vitamin D
₃
levels and influenza, as being in the sunshine means more vitamin D
₃
. The main source of vitamin D is conversion from sunshine. In food it’s found in salmon, sardines, shrimp, whole milk, cod, butter, Activator X, and eggs. Among salmon, wild-caught fish have been shown to average significantly more vitamin D than non-organically farmed fish. The very best supplement to take for vitamin D
₃
is Activator X, which is the butter made from whole, raw, living milk identified by Dr. Price.

Sources of healthy saturated fats are Activator X, beef, butter, cheese, cocoa butter, coconut, coconut butter and oil, crème fraǐche, eggs, lamb, red palm oil, sour cream, whole coconut milk, and whole milk.