Fat & Cholesterol: Our Biggest Fear or New Best Friend
PREVIEW: why we're recommended a low-fat diet to lower cholesterol & turned to ultra-processed carbs or polyunsaturated fats instead.PS — if you end up loving this article, enjoyed learning from it, or found it useful for your family and can think of anyone else who may find it interesting, please help me get it in their hands! Send this article via text, email, or messenger below!
Can you believe we’ve been told to eat low-fat and 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 easier to overcome your health struggles or finally achieve results that last? Have rates of disease gone down or up?
Why low-fat 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 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 all the heart disease after Eisenhower’s heart attack.
Keys’ research was the “science” our government & healthcare providers relied on when they started making low-fat, low-cholesterol recommendations AND CONTINUES TO BE THE ONLY REASON THEY STILL DO — his research is why “eating less fat” became what we know to be a “healthy diet” & the reason our dietary guidelines still tell us to eat more carbs than anything else (see below). You’ll find his research constantly called one of the “greatest contributions to public health in the 20th century because he helped decline heart disease.“ Well alright, if that’s the case, let’s take a peek at his work!
The research on cholesterol & saturated fats we’re still believing:
At first, Keys suspected cholesterol was the cause of the heart disease. 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 (in other words: if plaque = heart disease and cholesterol = plaque, then cholesterol = heart disease). So originally his research tried to prove eating cholesterol raises cholesterol levels in our blood and creates plaque — BUT AFTER YEARS OF TRYING TO PROVE IT 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 eating cholesterol-rich foods wasn’t to blame for the heart disease, Keys decided to study the richest source of cholesterol: saturated fat. Now, he was suspecting that if plaque causes heart disease, cholesterol is found in plaque, and saturated fat contains cholesterol… then saturated fat causes heart disease. He conducted the Seven Countries Study to prove it which asked 12,000+ people about the food they ate — and this was the study used to “prove” eating fat & cholesterol increases heart disease.
The problem with Keys’ research & why it’s not reliable:
The Seven Countries Study basically claimed Keys’ hypothesis was true: that saturated fat causes heart disease because saturated fat has cholesterol and cholesterol causes plaque. It’s why we’re told “saturated fats are unhealthy” and why we avoid cholesterol-rich foods like the plague.
But NONE of Keys’ research makes sense:
Most obviously: rates of heart disease HAS NOT DECREASED since we started eating less saturated fats. Heart disease has actually INCREASED — to the point it’s the leading cause of death in America (#redflag).
The Seven Countries Study was disproven by Jacob Yerushalmy and Herman Hilleboe in 1957 (graph below) who proved Keys CHERRY PICKED results from 7 countries, leaving out 10 other countries, which when all included, would have made his research STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT (meaning: weak, inconsistent results not worth paying attention to) and shown several countries with HIGHER SATURATED FAT INTAKE but LOWER RATES OF HEART DISEASE (Yerushalmy & Hilleboe’s paper was extremely hard to find online #redflag).
The Seven Countries Study was strictly OBSERVATIONAL: the results only show CORRELATION NOT CAUSATION. Meaning: none of the data “proves” increasing saturated fat is specifically what increased heart disease. “Plaque has cholesterol and 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 — we can’t be certain X caused Y if Y could’ve happened for other reasons besides X. This is why interventional, placebo-controlled randomized studies are sooo great.
Most importantly: we have plenty of those interventional, placebo-controlled randomized studies that proves “eating less cholesterol” DOES NOT lower the cholesterol in our blood.
Despite all that, saturated fat was still blamed for the rates of heart disease — and because the highest amounts of saturated fats are found in animal fats, the “eat less animal fat” because “animal fat causes heart disease” still became gospel. Even organizations we’ve grown to trust refuse to update their guidelines: the American Heart Association still recommends you replace saturated fats (eggs, meat, butter, ghee, tallow, lard, coconut oil) with polyunsaturated liquified plant oils (canola, cottonseed, corn, peanut, vegetable, soybean, safflower, sunflower, grapeseed) and federal agencies including the Senate and HHS have fully backed low animal fat intake since the 1970s which today’s 2020 MyPlate hasn’t strayed from.
The shift from saturated fats to polyunsaturated plants behind the scenes:
While Keys’ was painted as the hero of heart disease who saved us from saturated fats and cholesterol — what else was happening? Was anything else possibly contributing to increasing rates of heart disease?
Well, Proctor & Gamble had been turning cotton seeds (byproduct from the cotton industry) into candles, soaps — and cooking oil. Since the early 1900s, P&G had been “hydrogenating” cottonseed oil into Crisco, marketing it as a healthier cooking oil than animal fats, leading the way for other plant-based fats like shortening, margarines, or vegetable oils to be used instead.
AND WE’VE BEEN INHALING THEM EVER SINCE. Consumption of these plant-based fats skyrocketed,
Who can blame us. We trusted the American Health Association when they started recommending plant-based fats as healthier than animal fats in 1961. We trusted the USDA and the WHO, too.
The missing information on plant-based fats
What health organizations forgot to mention about these plant-based alternatives to animal fats is:
Hydrogenated plant-based fats (like shortening, margarine, vegetable oils) are TRANS FATS: they are normally liquid at room temperature but have been manually altered to make them solid at room temp to mimic animal fats). These trans fats have a long list of adverse effects — which ironically include increased risk of heart disease & increase cholesterol’s ability to oxidize/turn to plaque (this got them removed off the FDA’s Generally Recognized As Safe list and mandated to be labeled on food labels).
Polyunsaturated plant-based oils (like cottonseed, canola, vegetable, soybean, sunflower, safflower oil) are 30-70% LINOLEIC ACID (about 10x the amount found in animal fats): a polyunsaturated fat that are extremely more sensitive & susceptible to oxidation inside our body than saturated animal fats.
Maybe they “forgot” to mention this — because they’re sponsored by plant-based fats. Maybe they advise against animal fats and vouch for the plant-based fats paying their rent. 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,
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