Low Fat Diet: Saturated With Lies

Beef.  Chicken. Eggs.  Butter.  Coconut oil.  Avocados.  Do these saturated-filled words sound like weapons of health destruction?  According to current nutritional guidelines, I’m supposed to limit these foods because they’ll either lead to obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes or some form of suffering for the rest of my life.  Many of you are nodding your heads in agreement right now.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that this is simply not true.

When I became a fast food drop out in my early 20’s, I turned to a low fat diet.  I trimmed fat any which way I could and didn’t feel guilty when I broke down and ate low fat junk food.

I learned that low-fat junk food is still junk food, and a low-fat diet is still an unhealthy diet.

Why Are Saturated Fats So Bad For You?

Men’s Health published an excellent article that explained how saturated fats became known to be so bad.  The credit goes to a physiologist named Ancel Keys, Ph.D., who published a highly influential paper titled “Atherosclerosis, a Problem in Newer Public Health.” Keys wrote that while the total death rate in the United States was declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.

The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a “remarkable relationship” and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys’s assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.

The other salient criticism of Keys’s study was that he had observed only a correlation between two phenomena, not a clear causative link.  This left open the possibility that something else — unmeasured or unimagined — was leading to heart disease. After all, Americans did eat more fat than the Japanese, but perhaps they also consumed more sugar and white bread, and watched more television.

The seven-countries study, published in 1970, is considered Ancel Keys’s landmark achievement. It seemed to lend further credence to the diet-heart hypothesis. In this study, Keys reported that in the seven countries he selected — the United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Netherlands — animal-fat intake was a strong predictor of heart attacks over a 5-year period. Just as important, he noted an association between TOTAL cholesterol and heart-disease mortality. This prompted him to conclude that the saturated fats in animal foods — and not other types of fat — raise cholesterol and ultimately lead to heart disease.[1]

What about Margarine and Hydrogenated Fats?

Margarine and hydrogenated fats were the result of a food shortage in World War II.  Butter became scarce and chemists experimented to find an alternative.  They found that liquid vegetable oils could be turned into solid fat through a process called hydrogenation.

During this process, hydrogen gas is bubbled into the oil, which is heated to a high temperature. Nickel is then added to speed up the reaction. These hydrogenated fats are what make up margarine and shortening. Synthetic dyes are added to turn the whitish-colored hydrogenated fats into margarine.  They were promoted as “low in cholesterol and saturated fats.”  This is true.  However, they are high in unnatural, harmful fats and cancer causing chemicals.[2]

Why Are Processed Fats So Bad?

If you are getting the wrong kinds of fats in your diet, beware. No doubt, your body needs a certain amount of fat every day, but it needs the “good” fats. If all you get is the processed kind, your body has no choice but to make use of them. Processed fats, especially the hydrogenated variety, confuse the body because their chemical structure is different than the naturally occurring fats normally recognized and utilized by the body.

Once the “bad” fats are absorbed, they are taken to the liver where they are stored or converted into energy. The chemistry of these fats is abnormal so the liver has hard time trying to figure out what to do with them. When a cell is damaged and needs fatty acids for repair or other purposes, these abnormal fats will be made available to the cell, especially if there is a lack of natural, essential fats. The cell will attempt to place the abnormal fat into its membrane, resulting in a weakened, malfunctioning cell.

While hydrogenated fats may not become rancid on the shelf, they induce all sorts of rancidity problems within the body. They waste antioxidants such as vitamin E and selenium, which function to prevent fats from becoming rancid.

When you eat too much GOOD saturated fat, the body converts it to monounsaturated fat—the main fat in olive oil, which lowers cholesterol.  Some saturated fats, such as coconut oil, raise the beneficial cholesterol carrier HDL, which is linked to a reduced risk of heart disease. Ironically, the fat around the heart muscle itself is saturated.

What about Cholesterol?

By itself, cholesterol can be a good thing.  Cholesterol is used to make all hormones and functions as an antioxidant – it naturally increases as we age.

Kevin Brown, author of The Liberation Diet, points out that the more cholesterol we eat, the less the body makes; the less we eat, the more the body makes.  High cholesterol is a sign of something else failing to work properly in the body, not a disease that needs to be treated.

Bottom Line

When you eat fats as part of your meal, they slow down absorption so that you can go longer without feeling hungry. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Dietary fats are also needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption, and for a host of other biological processes.

Humans have eaten animal products for most of their existence on earth and therefore, they have consumed saturated fats for most of that time. If saturated fats were of no value or were harmful to you, why would breast milk produce saturated fats like butyric, caproic, caprylic, capric, lauric, myristic, palmitic and stearic acids, which provide a naturally perfected source of nourishment to ensure the growth, development and survival of your infants?

However, There IS Still a Link Between Fat and Heart Disease!

Now, it is clear that there is some association between fat and heart disease. The problem lies in the fact that most studies make no effort to differentiate between saturated fat and trans fat.[3] For more information on saturated fats, I would recommend reading “Know Your Fats” by Mary Enig, PhD, and visiting the Weston A. Price website at www.westonaprice.org

[1] Teicholz, Nina.  (2007 Dec 13).  What if bad fat isn’t so bad? http://www.menshealth.com.

[2] Extracted from “Eat Right or Die Young” by Dr. Cass Igram who is a physician, healer, and expert in nutritional therapy. He received his B.S. degree at the University of Northern Iowa in biology and chemistry. He received his degree at the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, Des Moines, Iowa. Dr Igram is a respected lecturer and educator. He specializes in teaching both doctors and the public about nutritional treatments.

[3] http://www.mercola.com