Eat Fat, Lose Fat (8 page)

“Hundreds of millions of tax dollars are wasted by the bureaucracy and the self-interested Heart Association,” he wrote in his invitation to participants. “Segments of the food industry play the game for profits. Research on the true causes and prevention is stifled by denying funding to the ‘unbelievers.’ This meeting will review the data and expose the rascals.”

The meeting did take place, but several speakers dropped out at the last minute, leading Mann to comment, “Scientists who must go before review panels for their research funding know well that to speak out, to disagree with this false dogma of Diet/Heart, is a fatal error. They must comply or go unfunded. I could show a list of scientists who said to me, in effect, when I invited them to participate, ‘I believe you are right, that the Diet/Heart hypothesis is wrong, but I cannot join you because that would jeopardize my perks and funding.’ For me, that kind of hypocritical response separates the scientists from the operators—the men from the boys.”

By the 1990s, the United States had been transformed from a healthy nation consuming real foods, including traditional animal fats and tropical oils, into a decidedly unhealthy nation that ate mostly imitation foods based on vegetable oils. Consumption of butter was at an all-time low; use of lard and tallow was down by two-thirds. Prosperous Americans now consumed the same type of diet that Dr. Price observed in his Depression-era patients—and suffered from the same health problems he warned against.

Margarine consumption has changed little since 1960, perhaps because knowledge of margarine’s dangers has been so slowly seeping into the public consciousness. However, most of the trans fats in the current American diet come not from margarine but from shortening used in fried and processed foods. And since the 1940s, the content of that shortening has gradually changed from mostly lard, tallow, and coconut oil to partially hydrogenated soybean oil. At the same time, shortening consumption shot up. By 1993, it had tripled to over 30 grams per person per day.

But the most dramatic overall change in the American diet was a 15-fold increase in the consumption of liquid vegetable oils, from slightly less than 2 grams per person per day in 1909 to over 30 in 1993.

In our view, the largely unrecognized power of the vegetable oil industry explains why myths about the “dangers” of saturated fat and cholesterol have dominated popular thinking about what constitutes a healthy diet. Fortunately, the wind of opinion has begun to shift. Even some old-line adherents of the lipid hypothesis may be tacking in a new direction.

The Evolution of Ideas

In 1998, a symposium titled “Evolution of Ideas About the Nutritional Value of Dietary Fat” reviewed the many flaws in the lipid hypothesis. One participant was David Kritchevsky, the same researcher whose early work helped launch the lipid hypothesis. He noted that the use of low-fat diets in a number of experiments “did not affect overall CHD mortality.” And he concluded, “Research continues apace and, as new findings appear, it may be necessary to reevaluate our conclusions and preventive medicine policies.”

Finally, it seems, scientists are waking up from their long infatuation with the lipid hypothesis. Eventually our government and medical experts will be forced to issue revised policies on saturated fat, just as they finally have had to admit that trans fats are dangerous. But there’s no reason for you to wait for official government pronouncements to begin enjoying the health and weight-loss benefits of saturated fats. To learn more about why these fats are good for you, and more about the harmful effects of vegetable oils and trans fats, turn to Chapter 3.

In this chapter, you’ll learn why you need the healthy fats you will consume on this diet. Second, we’ll show you why eating unhealthy fats and low-fat products can sabotage your health and weight-loss goals. And finally, we’ll explain the facts about your need for vital nutrients that you may not be getting if you’re only consuming the USDA Recommended Daily Allowances (RDAs) of vitamins and minerals.

Why You Need the
Right
Kinds of Fat

In all three of the Eat Fat, Lose Fat programs, you will be consuming not only coconut oil, but also cod-liver oil supplements (which work in combination with coconut), as well as other healthy traditional fats such as butter, egg yolks, meat fats, and even lard. These fats provide key nutrients you need to maintain both optimal health and your desired weight.

Fats and Your Brain

Sixty percent of the brain is composed of fat. Phospholipids (which contain about
50 percent saturated fats
) help make up the brain cell membranes. They contain two fatty acids and one proteinlike component. Generally, the phospholipids in the cell membranes contain one saturated fatty acid and one unsaturated fatty acid. Thus you nourish your brain cells when you eat saturated fats, and when you don’t eat enough saturated fats, the chemistry of your brain may be compromised. In a recent study, rats given vegetable oils low in saturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids had more strokes and shorter life spans.

Fats in the Cells

Saturated fats maintain cellular integrity everywhere in the body. Why? Because
every
cell membrane is ideally made up of about 50 percent saturated fat. When we eat too much polyunsaturated oil and not enough saturated fat (or carbohydrates that the body turns into saturated fat), our cells don’t function correctly. Those cell membrane fatty acids need to be saturated for the cell to have the necessary “stiffness” or integrity and to work properly. When the cell walls do not contain enough saturated fat, they actually become “floppy” and cannot work properly.

Fats in Your Bones

A study published in the 1996
American Oil Chemists Society Proceedings
found that for calcium to be effectively incorporated into the skeletal structure, at least 50 percent of dietary fats should be saturated. Why has osteoporosis become such a problem these days? One reason is the lack of fats like coconut oil and butter in our diets.

Fats and Your Liver

Open any biochemistry textbook and you will read that saturated fats protect the liver from toxins like alcohol and Tylenol. The tradition of eating butter or lard before a drinking bout is based on good science (although we do not recommend anything but very moderate alcohol consumption!). Today, as people shun saturated fats and eat more polyunsaturated oils, liver problems have become more common.

Fats and Your Heart

Saturated fats provide energy to the heart in times of stress. Studies have shown that saturated fats are the heart’s preferred food, which is why there is a concentration of saturated fat in the tissues surrounding the heart. Moreover, two studies have shown that saturated fatty acids in the diet lower a substance in the blood called Lp(a), which (unlike cholesterol) is a good predictor of heart disease. Furthermore, saturated fats help reduce levels of a substance called C-Reactive Protein (CRP), an indicator of inflammation. Current theories hold inflammation responsible for many cases of heart disease.

Levels of total cholesterol, HDL (high-density lipoprotein, or “good” cholesterol) and LDL (low-density lipoprotein, or “bad cholesterol”) are actually not good predictors of heart disease. And, as we saw in Chapter 2, heart disease is just as frequent in people with low cholesterol as in those with high cholesterol.

Fats and Your Lungs

The lungs cannot work without adequate saturated fats in the diet. This is because the fatty acids in the lung surfactant (a fluid that enables the lungs to work) are normally 100 percent saturated. When people consume a lot of partially hydrogenated fats and vegetable oils, trans fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids are put into the phospholipids where the body normally needs saturated fatty acids. As a result, the lungs cannot work effectively.

Recent research suggests that consumption of trans fats and excess polyunsaturated oils contributes to the rising incidence of asthma in children, while children who consume ample amounts of butterfat have much lower rates of asthma. In fact, changes in fat consumption patterns over the past 30 years explain the rising incidence of all types of lung disease, including asthma and lung cancer.

Fats and Your Kidneys

Omega-3 fatty acids, saturated fats, and cholesterol all work together synergistically to maintain normal kidney function, which is critical for managing blood pressure and filtering toxins from the body. High consumption of polyunsaturated oils by the rats in the study mentioned on resulted in injury to the kidneys as well as the brain.

Coconut oil also enhances kidney function by providing a saturated fatty acid called myristic acid, which plays a vital role in the biochemistry of the kidneys. In a key reaction called myristolation, myristic acid is added to a protein. This process allows the cells of the kidney to communicate with each other.

Fats and Your Hormones

Hormones are the body’s messengers, acting on the brain, nervous system, and glands and affecting thousands of bodily functions. Hormones require the right kinds of fats for proper functioning; your body cannot make stress and sex hormones without vitamin A, provided exclusively by fatty animal foods such as liver, shellfish, and cod-liver oil (taken as liquid or capsules). In contrast, the wrong kind of fats (the trans fatty acids)
inhibits
the production of stress and sex hormones, leading to problems with glucose balance, mineral metabolism, and reproduction.

Fats and Prostaglandins

Hormones that act locally, within the cells, are called prostaglandins. There are three major classes of prostaglandins, two of which are made from omega-6 fatty acids and one of which is made from omega-3 fatty acids. For the optimal production and balance of these prostaglandins, you need a good balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, with no more than two or three times more omega-6 than omega-3. Unfortunately, in the modern diet, the ratio is more like 20 to 1, as a result of the high consumption of vegetable oils containing mostly omega-6 fatty acids.

While saturated fats play key roles in regulating the production of prostaglandins, trans fats interfere with this process, resulting in all sorts of imbalances that can lead to inflammation, weight gain, allergies, asthma, and even alcoholism and cancer.

Coconut oil in conjunction with other traditional fats supports the optimal production and balance of prostaglandins. So to redress this imbalance between omega-6 and omega-3, it is essential to avoid all commercial vegetable oils (which are composed largely of omega-6 fatty acids) and add coconut and traditional food sources of omega-3 fatty acids to the diet, such as wild salmon, egg yolks, from pastured chickens, and flax oil (added in small amounts to salad dressings).

Fats and Cell Communication

Both myristic acid from coconut and another saturated fatty acid called palmitic acid are involved in complex processes of cell communication. To adequately supply the body with the wide range of saturated fatty acids for these and the other functions we’ve described, it’s important that the fats in our diet come from a variety of sources (including coconut oil).

All Fats Are Not Created Equal

We’ve already described the three basic types of fats and explained why saturated fats are
not
the culprits in the current epidemic of heart disease. Now let’s explore in more depth the differences between saturated fats, especially coconut oil and polyunsaturated fats—particularly in relation to your health, weight loss, and well-being.

An oil’s degree of saturation is determined by the climate in which it is grown. Vegetable oils from nuts and seeds that grow in northern climates contain mostly polyunsaturated oils. They are liquid at room temperature in a temperate zone. A temperate-climate plant like the olive tree produces a mono-saturated oil that is liquid at warm temperatures but hardens when refrigerated. Vegetable oils from plants grown in tropical regions (like the coconut and palm) were designed by nature with increased saturation to help maintain their plant’s leaf stiffness even in a hot climate where less firm oils would melt. That’s why tropical oils are liquid in the tropics but hard as butter in northern climates.

Special Properties of the Coconut

Among saturated fats, coconut is queen because of its special properties.

Coconut Contains Abundant Medium-Chain Fatty Acids (MCFAs)

While longer-chain fatty acids, found in many foods, need to be digested by bile salts (secreted by the gallbladder), coconut’s medium-chain fatty acids do not. That’s why if you have trouble digesting fats, or are beginning to reintroduce fat to your diet, it’s best to begin with coconut oil.

Coconut Contains High Amounts of Lauric Acid

The main MCFA in coconut oil is lauric acid, a proven antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal agent that is also found in mother’s milk. Converted in your body to a substance called monolaurin, it helps you defend against viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens and strengthens your immune system, protecting you from a wide range of diseases. Highly protective lauric acid should be called a “conditionally essential fatty acid,” because it is made only by the mammary gland and not in the liver like other saturated fats. You can get it from just three dietary sources: in small amounts, butterfat, and in large amounts, coconut oil and palm kernel oil.

Coconut Is Synergistic with Essential Fatty Acids

Your body needs saturated fats to most effectively retain and use essential fatty acids (EFAs). When you consume lots of saturated fats, your body actually needs only a very small amount of essential fatty acids (both omega-3 and omega-6).

Polyunsaturates: The Wrong Kinds of Fats

Remember all those television commercials singing the praises of polyunsaturated oils, like corn, safflower, soy, canola, and others? Well, they were just that: commercials.

Remember the warnings by leading doctors and medical authorities condemning saturated fats and encouraging polyunsaturates for heart health?

Perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out that many physicians were misled by the strategic influence campaign brought to you by industries that benefited financially from this (supposed) health message, as you’ve seen in Chapter 2.

Other Healthy Fat Sources

On our diet, in addition to coconut and cod-liver oil, you will be consuming other healthy fats from dairy, eggs, and meats. These are foods that, along with coconut, many doctors and government officials have told us not to eat. However, they contain many valuable nutrients and cofactors and should be part of your diet. The Eat Fat, Lose Fat programs include a number of healthy nutrients from milk products, eggs, and meats that you’ll enjoy. Here’s why you need them.