Cholesterol and the myth of healthy low fat diets

Well, wow, big shock I have a health rant!

:look

This is a really, really good article by a Naturopathic Doctor. Sure it may go against 'conventional' wisdom.. but honestly, lets start looking at the results of that wisdom folks. See that we are as healthy as we used to be 100 years ago? Do we actually have a lower instance of heart disease? Cancer? Diabetes? Nope!

Here's a cool but scary exercise...

Put up 10 fingers. They represent 10 people you know.

50% of them are diabetic or pre-diabetic.

50% already have an autoimmune disease.

50% of the males will get cancer and 38% of the women will get cancer.

Almost 50% will die from heart disease.

90% will die prematurely of a degenerative disease.

That leaves one person that will live to a lovely old age without these issues.

Which will it be?

Why do we spend so much money and resources on 'health' care and yet are sicker now then ever before? Is it really health care or is it sickness management? Wouldn't acutal 'health' care be more proactive in keeping us healthy rather than only addressing us when we have symptoms of dis-ease? Why do we keep doing the same thing that hasn't been working out so well in the past and expect a different result?


February, 2006

1.

"A massive crusade has been conceived to ˜lower your cholesterol
count" by rigidly restricting dietary fat, coupled with aggressive
drug treatment. The public is so brainwashed, that many people
believe that the lower your cholesterol, the healthier you will be or
the longer you will live. Nothing could be further from the truth."
-- Dr. Paul J. Rosch, President of the American Institute of Stress,
Clinical Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at New York Medical
College.

I recently attended a lecture by Sally Fallon, co-author of "Eat Fat
Lose Fat" and co-author of cookbook "Nourishing Traditions* with Mary
Enig, Ph.D. Her talk entitled "The Oiling of America" filled in many
gaps for me about why there has been so much confusion about fats and
oils. The bottom line diet recommendation from her talk: If we eat a
traditional diet like our ancestors--including animal fats, foods
rich in saturated fats, and such as coconut oil we have a better
chance of a long healthy life than if we follow the "Prudent Diet"
which was launched in 1956 advocating a low fat diet including the
substitution of margarine instead of butter and cereals instead of eggs.

Please read this summary and refer to the links and books provided to
learn more. The subject of dietary fats is important to understand so
that you make healthy choices for you and your family. We have been
educated with false information about fats for a very long time, and
now, actually, over the last several years, we are being exposed to
more of the truth, albeit difficult to sort out at times due to the
extent of misinformation. This overall problem seems to come from
misuse of scientific data and inquiry to support the edible oil
industry's agenda over the last fifty years.

Why are so many people confused about fats in their diets? Why does
the popular "South Beach Diet" book recommend against eating saturated
fats? Why so much emphasis on lowering cholesterol and eating a low
fat diet when we need fats to properly grow and develop, support
immunity, process fatty acids, support the integrity of our cell
membranes, have our brains function properly, etc.

What Fallon shared with us the other night was the story of "The
Oiling of America," written by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, Ph.D. in
1999 and published in Nexus Magazine. It was a revealing and amazing
story about the history of the move from the traditional diet to the
"Prudent Diet" as the leaders in the edible oil industry with their
connections to FDA officials misguided public opinion to dramatically
change our diets. This has been a terrible scam perpetrated on the
American public over the last fifty years.

Cut and paste the following link into your browser to read the entire
story of "The Oiling of America": http://easydiagnosis.com/articles/ oiling.html

To sum up what I learned from Fallon's talk and reading Enig's
article: in the 1950's as the incidence of Heart Disease was
climbing, there was a search for key causal factors. Some scientific
studies held the hypothesis that eating saturated fats was the key
contributing factor to high cholesterol levels and a high risk of
coronary heart disease. This hypothesis is highly suspect since the
incidence of heart disease had been climbing in the first have of the
1900's while saturated fat consumption had been falling!

This hypothesis was referred to as the lipid hypothesis, namely that
saturated fat and cholesterol from animal sources raise cholesterol
levels in the blood, leading to deposition of cholesterol and fatty
material as pathogenic plaques in the arteries.

Some of the people who were heavily invested in the edible oil
industry began promoting this theory and producing expensive studies
that supposedly proved their hypothesis. The problem was that the
scientific data was often altered by grouping data incorrectly,
choosing only data points that supported their hypotheses, or drawing
conclusions that didn't support their findings. Also, studies that
concluded that there was no link between saturated fats and coronary
heart disease and especially data that those who had eaten low
cholesterol diets died earlier were kept suppressed. To read more,
get "The Cholesterol Myths" by Uffe Ravnskov, MD, Ph.D. and the
article, "The Oiling of America."

Scientists who reported evidence contrary to the lipid hypothesis
were harassed and threatened with loss of funding. This happened to
Mary Enig who, after publishing her findings about fats in an obscure
journal in 1978, was visited by the oil industry leaders and told
that her funding would be taken away. Enig's research continued to
come under attack for many years. Many other researchers declined to
pursue their interests in dietary fats because they knew no funding
would be available to support research that might oppose the lipid
hypothesis.

Another subject of misinformation were cholesterol levels indicating
risk of heart disease which were set by self-appointed experts at the
1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference where they set the level of 200
as the risk marker, which implied most Americans were at risk. While
the American Medical Association in the 1960's refuted the lipid
hypothesis. Enig quotes from their warning: "the anti-fat, anti- cholesterol
fad is not just foolish and futile. . . it also carries some risk." In the 1980's,
the physicians were sent kits to educate them about the supposed high
risks of heart disease for cholesterol counts. In the early 1990's the
standard recommendation for children above two years of age was a
low fat, low cholesterol diet.

Fallon argues convincingly that this misguided science and promotion
of low cholesterol diets has proven to be genocidal dietary advice to
Americans and has extended itself around the world as other countries
mimic the low fat diets and eating fast foods. A part of this global
adoption of processed foods includes the participation of Peter
Barton Hutt, a lawyer with ties to the edible oil industry. In the
early 1970's, Hutt became the General Counsel for the FDA and on his
own authority changed the rules about food labeling in 1973. What
Hutt put into practice was a policy whereby food manufacturers no
longer had to state they were producing imitation foods. This opened
the flood gates for processed foods in the United States.

Enig explains "The new imitation policy meant that imitation sour
cream, made with vegetable oil and fillers like guar gum and
carrageenan, need not be labeled imitation as long as artificial
vitamins were added to bring macro nutrient levels up to the same
amounts as those in real sour cream. Coffee creamers, imitation egg
mixes, processed cheeses and imitation whipped cream no longer
required the imitation label, but could be sold as real and
beneficial foods, low in cholesterol and rich in polyunsaturates.

These new regulations were adopted without the consent of Congress,
continuing the trend instituted under Nixon in which the White House
would use the FDA to promote certain social agendas through
government food policies.

Enig goes on to state, "The American Medical Association at first
opposed the commercialization of the lipid hypothesis and warned
that 'the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol fad is not just foolish and
futile. . . it also carries some risk." Finally, the medical
community succumbed to the marketing tactics of the oil industry and
started doing cholesterol screenings and recommending the "Prudent
Diet" to lower cholesterol levels and supposedly the risk of heart
attack. In 1990, it was recommended that all children 2 years old or
older should be put on a low fat, low cholesterol diet. In "The
Cholesterol Myths", Ravnskov points out that the fatty streaks seen in
young children used to promote the lipid hypothesis are false
indicators. That is, fatty streaks in the arteries exist in all
humans before birth in all populations and carry no predictive
relationship to heart disease.

One of Mary Fallon's comments about cholesterol testing at the
lecture was, "If your doctor wants to screen for cholesterol, find
another doctor!" The data over the last 50 years does NOT support the
lipid hypothesis and in fact there is significant data to show there
is no relationship between low cholesterol eating and coronary heart
disease. Risk levels apparently only start being a slight
consideration for men at levels of 350 and above. Fallon also
suggested that there is no clear scientific data to validate that
there should be concerns about LDL being the "bad cholesterol"
that people should consciously be working to lower. (No reference
available for this, but there is information about LDL and HDL in The
Cholesterol Myths.)

What followed after all the misinformation about oils and cholesterol
was the marketing of cholesterol-reducing drugs. When the statin
class of drugs was being researched in Japan, the scientists
concluded that they were highly toxic and would have no medical
applications. The patents were sold to U.S. pharmaceutical companies
which produce these drugs like Lipitor that have many serious side
effects beyond the fundamental error of stimulating the lowering of
cholesterol. Side effects of Lipitor: reduced libido, muscle wasting,
neuropathy, cancer, intestinal disease, accidents, slow reaction
time, back pain, heart failure, stroke, depression, and suicide. It
also inhibits the absorption of CoQ10 that is needed for muscles to
function and blocks the absorption of Vitamin A. An ad for Lipitor
even states that it has not been shown to prevent heart disease or
heart attacks. Consider the increased risks of innocent drivers on
the road with the statin drug consumers known to have slower reaction
times and increased incidence of accidents.

Enig quotes from one of the Medical Doctors implicated in the spread
of false science: "'Many physicians will see the advantages of
using drugs for cholesterol lowering. . '" said Grundy, even though 'a
positive benefit/risk ratio for cholesterol-lowering drugs will be
difficult to prove.' The cost in the US of cholesterol screening and
cholesterol-lowering drugs alone now stands at sixty billion dollars
per year, even though a positive risk/benefit ratio for such
treatment has never been established. Physicians, however, have 'seen
the advantages of using drugs for cholesterol lowering as a way of
creating patients out of healthy people.' "

"George Mann, formerly with the Framingham project, [a long term,
large scale study of the lipid hypothesis] possessed neither funding
nor patience—he was, in fact, very angry with what he called the
Diet/Heart scam. His independent studies of the Masai in Africa,
whose diet is extremely rich in cholesterol and saturated fat, and
who are virtually free of heart disease, had convinced him that the
lipid hypothesis was 'the public health diversion of this
century. . . the greatest scam in the history of medicine.' "

The following is a section on the dangers of large amounts of dietary
polyunsaturates written by Mary Enig in the Oiling of America. "
Excess consumption of vegetable oils is especially damaging to the
reproductive organs and the lungs—both of which are sites for huge
increases in cancer in the US. In test animals, diets high in
polyunsaturates from vegetable oils inhibit the ability to learn,
especially under conditions of stress; they are toxic to the liver;
they compromise the integrity of the immune system; they depress the
mental and physical growth of infants; they increase levels of uric
acid in the blood; they cause abnormal fatty acid profiles in the
adipose tissues; they have been linked to mental decline and
chromosomal damage; they accelerate aging.

Excess consumption of polyunsaturates is associated with increasing
rates of cancer, heart disease and weight gain; excess use of
commercial vegetable oils interferes with the production of
prostaglandins leading to an array of complaints ranging from
autoimmune disease to PMS. Disruption of prostaglandin production
leads to an increased tendency to form blood clots, and hence
myocardial infarction, which has reached epidemic levels in America. "

"Vegetable oils are more toxic when heated. One study reported that
polyunsaturates turn to varnish in the intestines. A study by a
plastic surgeon found that women who consumed mostly vegetable oils
had far more wrinkles than those who used traditional animal fats. A
1994 study appearing in the Lancet showed that almost three quarters
of the fat in artery clogs is unsaturated. The 'artery clogging' fats
are not animal fats but vegetable oils."

*One comment in the opening cover of the second edition of "Nourishing
Traditions" summarizes the importance of the information published: "I
figured it would be only a matter of time before people would realize
that low fat and low cholesterol diets were highly overrated for
healthfulness. Now comes a cookbook author and food writer who is
well aware of the politically correct nutrition misinformation, but
who also has the knowledge and courage to challenge its assumptions."
Gene Logsdon, Author of the Contrary Farmer

After Dr. Marcia Smith's comments, read an article about a recent
study showing no correlation between heart disease and reduced
dietary fats. It is a perfect example of the confusing information
forthcoming from the media. Even though the study shows no
correlation, the advice in the article is still....to avoid saturated
fats!

"I have known for decades that low fat diets were not what they were
cracked up to be - I am sure that Dr. Barry Sears. Dr. Diana
Schwarzbein, Ann LouiseGittleman, The Price-Pottenger Foundation,
etc, etc are glad that the bubble has finally burst - The issue has
always been one of consuming good fats instead of bad fats - avoiding
all man-made, processed fats - eating like our ancestors, most of
whom ate liberal amounts of fat in the forms that nature intended.

"According to the statistics from the Centers for Disease
Control ...Heart Disease represented less than 10% of the Leading
Causes of Death in 1900 - but rose to the top of the charts as the
leading cause of death in 1994. You don't have to be a rocket
scientist to know that those in 1900 were trying to follow a low fat diet."
Marcia Smith ND