Fat & Cholesterol: Our Biggest Fear or New Best Friend
QUICK PREVIEW: why low-fat is still the most recommended diet, why it's become the backbone of all nutritional recommendations, and why we've turned to carbohydrates & polyunsaturated fats instead.
Can you believe we’ve been told to eat low-fat, low-cholesterol for over 50 YEARS now?? Question: how’s that working out for us? Have you seen your health get better? Has it gotten any easier to overcome your health struggles or finally get results that last? results that last? Has it helped disease rates go down?
When & Why Fat-Free Started:
Fat-free, cholesterol-free nutrition became our “gold standard” for health in the 1950s because heart disease was suddenly through the roof and Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955 was a great headliner that grabbed our attention and got us concerned about cardiovascular health.
Side note: America didn’t start classifying diseases until 1948 so rates of heart disease before this were mostly guesswork or non-existent.
That's when Ancel Keys entered the conversation. He stepped in to study the cause of heart disease. And his research was the “science” our government & healthcare providers relied on when they made low-fat, low-cholesterol recommendations — AND HIS RESEARCH CONTINUES TO BE THE ONLY REASON THEY STILL DO. His research is why we’re recommended to go low-fat more than any other nutritional recommendation to this day, the reason “avoiding fat” has become what we know as a “healthy diet” and the reason our dietary guidelines tell us to eat more carbs than anything else with barely any meat. You’ll find his research constantly referenced as one of the “greatest contributions to public health in the 20th century” because he helped decline heart disease. If that’s the case, let’s take a peek at his work.
The Research We’ve Relied On:
Originally, Keys claimed cholesterol was the problem: he figured because plaque in our arteries causes heart disease and because cholesterol is found in plaque, then the cholesterol we eat causes heart disease (if plaque = cholesterol then cholesterol = heart disease). Essentially, his research tried to prove that the cholesterol we eat raises the cholesterol in our blood which turns into plaque and heart disease — BUT AFTER YEARS OF TRYING TO PROVE THIS AS TRUE, he self-admittedly found that no matter how much cholesterol he fed his volunteers, the level of cholesterol in their blood was unchanged.
Since cholesterol specifically wasn’t to blame for heart disease, but cholesterol is found in saturated fat, Keys focused on the impact saturated fat intake had on heart disease instead. Now he was claiming if plaque causes heart disease, and cholesterol is found in plaque, and saturated fat contains cholesterol, then saturated fat causes heart disease (if plaque = heart disease and cholesterol = plaque and saturated fat = cholesterol, then saturated fat = heart disease). He conducted the Seven Countries Study which observed and surveyed 12,000+ people asking about the food they ate and “proved” the rate of heart disease increased as people ate more fat:
The Problem With Keys’ Research:
First of all, heart disease has NOT declined. It’s gotten worse, and it’s the leading cause of death in America. So there’s that.
His data was DISPROVEN by Jacob Yerushalmy and Herman Hilleboe in 1957 (graph below); they proved Ancel Keys CHERRY PICKED 7 countries, leaving out OTHER COUNTRIES which, when all included, made his data STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT (not worth paying attention to) and also showed several countries with HIGHER consumption of saturated fats but LOWER rates of heart disease (red flag: Yerushalmy & Hilleboe’s research is way too hard to find online).
His data only shows CORRELATION, not causation (regardless of what countries he picked or how many) — meaning: none of his data “proves” that increasing saturated fat is what increased heart disease because saturated fat has cholesterol and cholesterol causes plaque. The idea of “plaque has cholesterol, cholesterol is in saturated fat, so saturated fat causes plaque” wouldn’t get a passing grade in high school science class. It’s like saying popsicles cause sunburn or living in a mansion makes you rich. Without controlling all the factors that could influence the outcome, you can’t say x causes y, because y could’ve happened for other reasons. This is why interventional, placebo-controlled randomized studies are so good (learn more: Credible vs Crap Science: Correlation Does Not Equal Causation)!
Unfortunately the “saturated fat is higher in animal fat so animal fat causes heart disease” theory still become gospel before it was tested (per usual), and even after Yerushalmy & Hilleboe’s rebuttal was published, the organizations we’ve grown to trust refuse to update their guidelines: the American Heart Association still recommends you opt for polyunsaturated liquid plant oils (examples: canola, cottonseed, corn, peanut, vegetable, soybean, safflower, sunflower) instead of saturated fats (examples: butter, ghee, tallow, lard, or coconut oil); and a handful of federal agencies including the Senate and HHS have fully backed low-fat recommendations since the 1970s which today’s 2010 MyPlate (see above) hasn’t strayed from.
The Problem Behind-The-Scenes:
So Ancel Keys’ research was dishonestly painted as the “hero” of our heart crisis — but what else was happening? Before the increased rate of heart disease or Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955, was there anything else possibly contributing to increasing rates of heart disease?
Well, Proctor & Gamble has been turning cotton seeds (a waste product from the cotton industry) into candles, soaps… and cooking oil? Since the early 1900s, they were “hydrogenating” cottonseed oil into Crisco, marketing it as better than animal fats like lard or butter, leading the way for other plant-based fats like shortening, margarines, or vegetable oils — and we’ve been inhaling them:
Who could blame us for eating them though; we trusted the American Health Association when they recommended plant-based fats in 1961! Our largest, leading non-profit on heart health told us it was the “right” thing to eat, and it’s obviously turned into the single-most influential nutritional policy ever published, as we’ve seen the USDA (and the WHO) adopt it as truth and make us gasp anytime someone has steak on their plate.
But they “forgot” to mention:
Hydrogenated plant-based fats (solid at room temp) like shortening and margarine are “trans fat” (meaning: the structure has been manually altered to make them solid at room temp). Trans fats have a long list of adverse effects including increased risk of heart disease & increasing cholesterol’s ability to oxidize which got them removed off the FDA’s Generally Recognized As Safe list and mandated to be labeled on food products.
Polyunsaturated plant-based oils (liquid at room temp) like cottonseed, canola, vegetable, soybean, sunflower, or safflower oil are 30-70% linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat which is a) extremely more sensitive & susceptible to oxidation inside our body than saturated fats and b) about 10x the amount of polyunsaturated fats in animal fat — despite what “seed oil misinformation” campaigns may tell you.
Maybe they “forgot” to mention this side of plant-based fats — because they’re sponsored by plant-based fats (and other industries). Maybe they advise against animal fats and vouch for the plant-based fats paying their rent.
At the same time, the Sugar Research Foundation was paying Harvard scientists to publish science in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine blaming fat instead of sugar for our poor heart health. One of them later worked for the USDA (Mark Hegstead).
When you take a step back and look at the past century objectively, it looks like it was all orchestrated to create a lucrative problem so they could profit off a solution:
Step 1: Market plant fats as healthy
Step 2: Headline the rates of heart disease
Step 3: Blame animal fats, boost plant fats
Step 4: Drs & pharmaceuticals profit off disease
Maybe instead of blaming these new plant-based fats for the rates of heart disease, we were told to blame the animal fats we’ve been eating for centuries (when our health was better for it).
The Problem With Low-Cholesterol:
It’s clear we’re recommended to “lower cholesterol” with plant-based fats — but why aren’t they sharing the research that (actually) proves lowering cholesterol isn’t necessarily “healthy.”
The Minnesota Coronary Experiment showed vegetable oils reduced cholesterol by 14% but INCREASED risk of heart disease/death by 22% for every 30 mg/dL compared to saturated animal fat.
The Sydney Heart Health Study showed vegetable oils had a 62% HIGHER death rate than saturated fats despite lowering cholesterol.
Cholesterol is so essential: our cells, hormones, bile, and vitamin D don’t function without it.
Cholesterol is made by our body when we don’t eat enough cholesterol-rich foods; this is the bodily process many statins suppress. However, creating our own cholesterol requires a lot of energy, which is why our body prefers to get cholesterol from our food and suppresses production of it’s own cholesterol when we’re eating enough of it. Maybe our body is overproducing cholesterol because you’re not eating enough cholesterol-rich foods.
Cholesterol-rich foods have yet to prove they lead to plaque as much as CARBS. Like we’ve mentioned, cholesterol is crucial, and often only becomes a problem or leads to plaque when we create an environment in our body that allows the cholesterol to get stuck in our arteries. There are so many nutrients that influence cholesterol levels besides fats¹ ²
What To With This Information:
We think putting carbohydrates and plant-based fats on a pedestal has done nothing — except make us suffer while the corporations producing these products profit. Do you?
Our favorite takeaways and what we always tell clients to consider:
Less plant-based fats (shortening, margarine, vegetable oil, and seed oils like canola, cottonseed, rapeseed, grapeseed, soybean, sunflower, or safflower)
Less simple, high-glycemic-load carbohydrates (juices, soda, teas, lemonades, cookies, cakes, candy, cereal, white or multigrain breads, syrups)
More animal fats (butter, ghee, tallow, lard)
More red meat (beef, venison, bison) — Red Meat: Why We Have Beef With Beef
Questions? Always rooting for you and honored to help or point you to someone else who can.
TO YOUR HEALTH,
CRAVING MORE? YOU MAY LIKE:
By the way! I’m Danika.
Middle-class, low-maintenance woman from the outskirts of town who didn’t keep trusting a broken, ass-backwards system to tell me the whole truth or what’s best for me. The internet can be so bittersweet sometimes, but I hope this space becomes a resource that inspires you to prioritize the most important foods, stress less about living perfectly & know your body best!
Craving a realistic, root-cause approach to real food? Maybe we’re your cup of tea.
