I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
–Walt Whitman
A few days ago, we looked at why we should not give up on animal fat. Specifically, five reasons. We go now to reasons six and seven.
Category: lipid hypothesis
Don’t Give Up The Fat!
The rate of cardiovascular disease suffered by both rural and urban Chinese males is almost indistinguishable from the rate experienced by American males, while the rates…for both rural and urban Chinese women is significantly higher than those suffered by American females….The notion that the Chinese don’t have disease of the heart…is what we like to call a vampire myth–it simply refuses to die.
–Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades
They go on to explain that part of the issue leading to confusion is that heart disease normally manifests as stroke in the Chinese, but as heart attack in Americans. A city-dwelling Chinese man only has half the heart attack risk of his American comrade–but six times the stroke risk. The underlying cause is exactly the same: coronary heart disease.
Cholesterol Mythology
Not really, and actually my cholesterol was 190 when I had the heart attack. 190, which isn’t that high.
–Mike Ditka
Guess who else’s cholesterol was well within the Mythical Safe Range when he had his first heart attack? Dwight Eisenhower, who was the ideal weight for his height and was very fit when his first heart attack hit at age 64. His cholesterol was 165.
So of course he was put on the now ubiquitous low-fat diet, which included lots of healthy whole grains like oatmeal and lots of margarine, almost no meat, and no fats but margarine and corn oil. What was the result of this amazingly healthy diet? Well, strangely he started gaining weight for the first time in his life. So much so that he kept cutting his food portions down till he was nearly starving: to no avail. Even more oddly, his cholesterol just kept going up and up. From 165 to 259. Just a couple days after Eisenhower got that highest reading, Ancel Keys got his face on the cover of Time for promoting the new “lipid hypothesis,” which blamed fat for everything and advocated, for the first time, a low-fat diet as the cure for all America’s heart disease problems.
Which, as we all know, has clearly been an incredible success, since Americans have no heart disease anymore.
Continue reading Cholesterol Mythology
Paging Dr. Oz…
Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory—let the theory go. ― Agatha Christie
“Paging Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz to the ER, stat.”
Nurse, what’s wrong?
Doctor, thank goodness you’re here. One of your patients is doing very poorly.
Oh no! Which one?
Lipid H. Po. Thesis
NO!
The China Study
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
–Charles de Gaulle
And that’s about the quality of the information we can glean from The China Study.
The China Study is a book by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell that purportedly proves without a doubt that the eating of animal foods causes all the chronic diseases of civilization, like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. It’s supposedly based on the results of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project which was, interestingly enough, directed by T. Colin Campbell and involved China, Cornell, and Oxford. As you can probably guess, the study followed Chinese people in rural areas of China and recorded what they say they ate, when they got sick, and how they died.
And The China Study is pretty much the “inspired by actual events,” made-for-TV movie version of the China-Cornell-Oxford project.
Now if you haven’t heard of this book, you obviously don’t have any vegan friends because this is their favorite thing in the world besides tofu. This proves, proves mind you, that if you get cancer it is entirely your own fault for insisting on eating chicken.
Objections, 3
Nullis in Verba
–Motto of the Royal Society of London
In Objections 2 we started talking about fat and explored just a little bit of the history behind the rise and dominance of the lipid hypothesis–that fat is the cause of obesity and health problems.
Now let’s talk a bit about the science.
Objections, 2
It is of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration; nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
–Plutarch
In the previous post I listed a common objection I hear to eating very-low carb: your brain needs glucose! In this post I deal with another common objection:
But all that saturated fat is very bad for you.
Ask Me How It Happened 