049. Demonization Of Fats And Cholesterol – Fats Part 2
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The Demonization Of Animal Fats
After a quick recap of part 1, you get another look back into how a small group of people ended up convincing most of the population globally about how bad animal fats were for our health.
This episode covers a list of fats to avoid as well as a list of fats to cook with, which are much more stable under heat,
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The World of Muscle
Link: www.theworldofmuscle.com
Hosts: Randy Roach and Tamas Acs
Episode #49: The Demonization Of Fats And Cholesterol
In This Episode:
Short refresher on eicosanoids
1956 American Heart Association begin their demonization of animal fats and cholesterol
Fats to avoid
Fats to cook with
Episode Summary and Updating
Part 2 on fats picked up with a reiteration that essential fatty acids (EFAs) cannot be produced by the body and must be supplied in the diet
With the presence of EFAs the body can produce all other fatty acids
EFAs are the building blocks for a subset of eicosanoids called prostaglandins which have very important functions in the body
Short, medium and long chain saturated fatty acids also have specific functionality throughout the body as well
It was the saturated fats that became demonized beginning back in the mid 1950s
In 1956 the American Heart Association (AHA) ran a fund raiser to promote their notion that saturated fat and cholesterol caused heart disease
The question today is did they ever really have evidence of such an assertion or was their an industrial and political agenda
One of the panelists for the fund raiser was Dr. Paul Dudley White who was president Dwight Eisenhower’s personal physician, one of the founders of the AHA and the one who introduced the ECG to the AHA
White did not accept the claim’s of the AHA regarding saturated fat and heart disease
He had never seen a MI patient (myocardial Infarction)until 1921 while the public had been consuming all kinds of saturated fats and cholesterol previously for millennia
Nonetheless, with the demonization of animal fats came the explosion of the edible oil industry based on vegetable and seed oils
Those oils were previously utilized within industries outside of the food supply such as for grease and paints
Shifting them into the western food system was a major financial boon to this industry
Randy stated that this atrocity was indicative of the politics of science at play
Those with the media voice have the power over administrative policy and public opinion
He again reiterated that through the decades of the 20th century the consumption of butter and other saturated fats had actually decreased while there was a corresponding dramatic increase in hydrogenated fats and refined sugar
Tamas added how common sense was thrown out the window as it was also apparent that the replacement of animal fats with vegetable fats did not cure the problem of heart disease
Randy thought another crime was the dismissal of the works of Dr. Weston A. Price who spent a decade studying many primitive cultures worldwide who consumed animal products as staple foods
Price noted:
As one stands in profound admiration before the stalwart physical development and high moral character of these sturdy mountaineers, he is impressed by the superior types of manhood, womanhood, and childhood that Nature has been able to produce from a suitable diet and a suitable environment. Surely, here is evidence enough to answer the question whether cereals should be avoided because they produce acids in the system which if formed will be the cause of tooth decay and many other ills including the acidity of the blood or saliva. Surely, the ultimate control will be found in Nature’s laboratory where man has not yet been able to meddle sufficiently with Nature’s nutritional program to blight humanity with abnormal and synthetic nutrition. When one has watched for days the child life in those high Alpine preserves of superior manhood; when one has contrasted these people with the pinched and sallow, and even deformed, faces and distorted bodies that are produced by our modern civilization and its diets; and when one has contrasted the unsurpassed beauty of the faces of these children developed on Nature’s primitive foods with the varied assortment of modern civilization’s children with their defective facial development, he finds himself filled with an earnest desire to see that this betterment is made available for modern civilization.6
Price spent his latter years collecting butter samples from around the world on a seasonal basis for nutrient comparison
He identified other fat soluble activators in addition to the crucial related vitamins such as A, E D and K found in animal fats
Price’s work along with that of Dr. Francis Pottenger, Dr. Robert McCarrison, and even Vilhjalmur Stefannson’s one year stint in Bellevue hospital where he thrived on animal fats and proteins, were cast aside with the launch of the Lipid Hypothesis in 1956
Randy still believes that Ancel Keys was a straw man for academia’s move to the Lipid Hypothesis as his name and seven country study is so synonymous with the push for connecting animal fats and cholesterol to heart disease
Keys’ original research used many more countries than seven but he discarded those that contradicted his research
Randy shared some of the negative indoctrination this propaganda had sewn over the years when a client of his used an analogy of sludge on the inside of pipes for not consuming animal fats
Tamas added how analogies such as this gave strong visuals that had impact on the public
How fats travel through a water pipe have nothing at all in common with how fats of all origins are digested, packaged, transported and assimilated into various cells
Randy conceded that he use to follow the biochemistry of nutrition quite closely through the 1980s and much of the 1990s but after realizing the politics behind the sciences, along with his discovery of the works of Price, McCarrison, Pottenger and Stefannson, he began to adopt more interest in nutritional history over chemistry
He liked how these men chose to look at healthy people and find out what made them healthy over that of researching sick people and what made them sic
Some of these cultures actually revered animal fats for their life giving force
Randy still supports biochemical research but both he and Tamas feel that one must use common sense to discern information regarding their own health
In bodybuilding, nutritional pioneers such as Rheo H. Blair and Vince Gironda studied the works of the above mentioned men
Men like Blair and Gironda who not only studied the works of Price, Pottenger and others were also reading additional research coming out of academia
They would be hard pressed not to be confused with the data coming into the 1980s as it would contradict much of what they knew and believed prior to the fat and cholesterol scare (Lipid Hypothesis)
Vince got temporarily sidetracked in the late 1970s when he pooped on protein and recommended only 45 grams per day
He must have changed his mind in the early 1980s with the release of his joint-venture book, Wild Physique” when he was back to a higher protein intake
Tamas stated that by the 1980s it was getting confusing as to just what articles Vince was writing and which ones were being ghost-written for him
The point here was that the data at that time was confusing to anyone trying to follow it based on previous beliefs and recommendations
Ron Kosloff of NSP Nutrition did not buy into the fat scare because of his experience with his grandfather who he knew ate six eggs daily and often ate pure lard sandwiches and lived to be 99 years old
Ron was also very impressed with one of the farm hands named Indian Joe who ate only meat and fat and lived to roughly 109 years of age
Randy and Tamas discussed more on Vince and the data pouring out in the late 1970s and into the 1980s
Randy said Vince may have been sidetracked briefly but Randy stated that he himself was suckered for over 10 years before he came to realize that the Lipid Hypothesis was based on lies
The discussion turned back to the real dangers that were in hydrogenated oils and the volatility of vegetable oil
Tamas shared that he cooked with coconut oil and lard
He prefers using a more refined coconut oil that does not have any of the coconut flavor left
Coconut oil is a very saturated fat thus stable for cooking
This oil was once used heavily in the food industry before politics saw it replaced with processed, hydrogenated oils
Animal fats such as beef tallow and lard are also heavily saturated thus stable for cooking and providing good taste to eggs, potatoes etc
Randy did not recommend cooking with butter due to the butter solids that would burn if not careful
He then shared the number of stages and products that milk yielded from cream to butter to clarified butter (ghee) which was much better for cooking since the butter solids were removed
When using a pint (500 ml) of heavy cream to make butter, Randy said he would typically get on a good yield about eight oz of butter with the remaining eight oz being buttermilk
Tamas gave a message for Canadians who are vegetarian, that being how difficult it would have been to follow such a specific diet in Canada 100 years ago especially through the winters since food to support a begetarian lifestyle would just not be available
Randy added that it is often found that saturated fats seem to be prevalent in the hotter climates where in the far northern cold waters the sea life had a higher concentration of polyunsaturated fats
He reminded listeners that there are no naturally occurring fats that are 100% saturated or 100% unsaturated
As mentioned in Part 1, triglycerides contain mixtures of short, medium and long chain fatty acids
Although coconut oil is a very saturated fat roughly 50% of the fatty acids are lauric acid with the remainder of the fat coming from other fatty acids
Fats such as butter would have a good amount of saturated fats but also have a fair degree of unsaturated fatty acids as well, just as vegetable oils will contain small amounts of saturated fats
Randy said he is often asked why coconut oil is liquid some times and solid at other times
He said that coconut oil has roughly 50% lauric acid which is in fact fully saturated, but it is a medium length chain so it is liquid above 72 degrees and solid below that temperature
Butter also will become very soft at room temperature compared to being hard when refrigerated
Randy added that raw butter from grass-fed cow milk is probably the most nutritious fat one could consume, containing short, medium and long chain fatty acids, fat soluble vitamins A, D, E K, conjugated linoleic acid CLA and and activator X
Tamas and Randy discussed how some have felt that Vitamin K was Weston Price’s activator X, but Randy said that this has been disputed and they had talked about this in their previous podcast on fermented cod liver oil
Randy felt this was insignificant and that you cannot go wrong with a diet of whole natural fats such as raw butter, coconut oil along with fresh olive oil and other stable animal fats to cook with
Randy recommended not cooking with olive oil due to its prominent fat being oleic acid which is monounsaturated and thus not as stable
Tamas then asked Randy about cooked fats vs raw fats
Randy said that cooking creates toxic by products such as lipid peroxides which are the result of the oxidative degradation of lipids
Aajonus Vonderplanitz has conducted his own research showing that both pasteurized and frozen butter is severely compromised in its healing capacity
Many compounds are compromised in cooking foods and this was discussed in the 10 part raw series
Frying foods is not the optimum way to cook foods
Randy mentioned how the eskimo would cook their meat briefly in hot water which creates less toxic by-products
Tamas closed the show by again recommending stable saturated fats such as coconut oil, lard beef tallow, duck fat and ghee for cooking
Avoid cooking with processed vegetable oils
Randy even recommended staying away from cold pressed vegetable oils and flax seed oils as these procedures still require processing that generates heat
Tamas has rendered his own lard from fat obtained from organically fed pigs
Randy shared how a friend of his was once in the business of collecting expired chocolate bars that would be fed to the pigs thus producing hydrogenated pigs
Randy also shared how he uses ghee for artificial tears as he has not had natural tearing since the mid 1980s
Tamas and Randy both recommended not eating a lot of fats and carbohydrates at the same time
Updates
Randy said he had received a very nice phone call from Lee Thompson of NSpire Sports League who just wanted to thank Randy for his Muscle, Smoke & Mirrors series