Published: Tue, 2011-10-04 00:24
Noel Kalicharan
In his September 27 article, “A plate of food,” Dr David Bratt made some interesting observations and some good recommendations. However, there were several statements that were misleading and some downright wrong. Take, for instance, “Bad fats, meaning trans and saturated fats, increase the risk for certain diseases. Good fats, meaning monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, do just the opposite.” The notion that saturated fats are bad for you and polyunsaturated fats are good was discredited 50 years ago. Yet the fallacy lives on in the minds of many, fuelled by huge advertising budgets of companies whose only target is your money, with little concern for your health.
This may surprise readers but quite the opposite is true: saturated fats (the kind you get from butter, cheese, eggs, meat and coconut oil) are good and polyunsaturated fats (from vegetable oils such as corn oil, canola oil and safflower seed oil) are bad. Monounsaturated fats, found in large amounts in olive oil, palm oil and lard, tend to be more neutral. I have spent the last five years conducting research on fats, oils, cholesterol and their relationship to heart disease. I have come to know how the myths (such as saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease) started and how they have been fuelled by big business interests to the point that, for decades, many people have believed them to be fact. A newspaper article is too short to give all the justifications for what I will say but it’s all spelt out in a document that I can send to whoever is interested (e-mail
noelkali@gmail.com).
In 1920 (when the American diet consisted of milk, butter, eggs and meat), myocardial infarction (MI) was almost nonexistent in the US. In 1930, deaths per year from MI was about 3,000. By 1950, there were about 400,000 MI deaths per year in the US, making coronary heart disease (CHD) the leading source of mortality in the US, causing more than 30 per cent of all deaths. What dietary or lifestyle changes could have caused this? In 1953, Dr Ancel Keys published a paper in which he attributed the steady increase in CHD deaths to high-fat food. His “proof” was a graph showing a close correlation between the total availability of fat and the death rates from CHD in six countries: the more fat eaten, the higher the number of deaths from CHD. However, what he did was trickery of the highest order, a blatantly dishonest, unscientific interpretation of the available data.
The trickery lay not in his graph, but in what he failed to include. Data was available for 22 countries, yet Dr Keys selectively chose just the six because they supported his agenda. When all the data were plotted, all correlation disappeared. In other words, countries with low consumption of fats had the same death rates from CHD as those with high consumption. Clearly, fat consumption could not be the cause of CHD. This classic case of “how to lie with statistics” has caused more heart-ache, more stress, more anxiety and made obscene amounts of money for many over the last 50 years or so. The deception continues unabated even today. Think about it: all the dietary advice about fats to stave off heart disease that you’ve heard for the last 50 years is based on this lie.
Despite being demonised by the drug companies, cholesterol is our friend, the body’s repair substance. It is essential to all animal life. Among many other uses, it is required to maintain the integrity of our cell membranes and is an important component for the manufacture of bile acids, steroid hormones, and fat-soluble vitamins including Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, and Vitamin K. When polyunsaturates are absorbed into the cell membranes, it results in reduced structural integrity, instability and “limpness.” When this happens, cholesterol is sequestered from the blood to restore “stiffness” to the membranes. So the polyunsaturates cause a problem and get praised because it results in reduced serum cholesterol. Worse, we are advised to use it because “it reduces cholesterol.”
Now we know why and it’s not good news. Polyunsaturated fats (margarine) and oils (canola, safflower, corn) are used to suppress the immune system. Such immunosuppression is known to start and promote cancer. Still think it’s a “good” fat? Most of our dietary recommendations come from big business, not from good science. These businesses have deep pockets and lobbyists in every major so-called health organisation (World Health Organisation, American Medical Association, American Heart Association etc). They can afford to pay what Prof George Mann calls “operators” (pseudo-scientists) to come up with “research results” that recommend their foods. Many people get taken in when they hear “the research has shown...” If we know how many so-called “results” are based on shoddy research or no research at all, we wouldn’t be so gullible.
Dr Bratt states, “In one study of male health professionals, men who drank two or more glasses of milk a day were almost twice as likely to develop advanced prostate cancer as those who didn’t drink milk at all.” Now that is quite an indictment on milk. Of course we know nothing about the quality of milk that was drunk. Was it laced with hormones as most commercial milk is? What is “twice as likely?” Let me explain how medical (and other) “research” comes up with “major breakthroughs” based on insignificant results. They divide the men into two groups of 1,000 each, say. One group drinks milk and the other doesn’t. At the end of the study, two men in the milk-drinking group and one man in the non-milk group develop advanced prostate cancer. That’s three men out of 2,000. That could be the result of pure chance. Yet, the conclusion of this study is that “men who drink milk are twice as likely to develop advanced prostate cancer as those who don’t.”
What’s funny is that if another “researcher” found that one man in the milk group and two in the non-milk group developed cancer (as could happen by chance), we would have heard about the great health benefits of drinking milk. Whom do we believe? Substitute “drinking milk” for taking drug A and you will get a good idea of the basis on which many drugs are found to be “effective” or “reduce your risk by 50 per cent.” It’s laughable to those in the know but, unfortunately, it sounds impressive to the general public. Coupled with slick advertising, we rush to buy a useless and, most times, dangerous drug.
Of course, the conclusion stated by Dr Bratt also ignores the studies done on the Masai and Samburu tribes in Kenya in the 1960s. These people gorge on nothing but milk and meat. In both tribes, their diets are high in saturated fat and cholesterol. If saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, CHD would have been epidemic in Kenya. Prof Mann found that their cholesterol levels were among the lowest ever measured, about 50 per cent less than most Americans. And they do not die from heart disease (or cancer). But, as he says, they might die laughing if they heard about the campaign against foods containing cholesterol and saturated fat.
Dr Bratt ends his article thus: “Helping people get the best possible nutrition advice is of critical importance as the world faces a burgeoning obesity and lifestyle epidemic brought on in great part by bad advice from governments and agricultural business interests.” He could have added, “and newspaper columnists.”
http://www.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2011/10/04/facts-about-saturated-fats-and-cholesterol
Author
