Welcome back to our series Your Health Is No Big Thing—It’s a Million Little Things. I am Susan DeLaney, a naturopathic doctor from North Carolina with a medical focus on keeping you well using food as the foundation of your health. 

For the past 50 years, the US Dietary Guidelines have recommended reducing fat in our diet based on the mistaken theory that fats contribute to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. In reality, quite the opposite is true. The reduced fat diet has led to an increased consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugary foods. Processed foods and sugar offer a quick source of energy, but one that is not lasting and requires frequent snacks to refuel. A diet that contains healthy fats helps sustain our energy and reduce hunger.

A regular diet of low fat and highly processed food has contributed to an epidemic of disease and chronic illnesses in our children such as we have never seen before. These foods provide children with energy from calories, but not the nutrients necessary for growth, repair, and daily functioning of our tissues and organs. Without nutrient dense foods that contain vitamins and minerals, children can develop poor physical structure, weak bones and muscles, and organs that function poorly.

Most people are not even aware that fats from natural sources actually contain vitamins. Who knew? The fat-soluble nutrients vitamins A, D, E, and K2, which are critical to your health and daily functioning, are dissolved in fats and absorbed when you eat fats in your diet. One of the consequences of lowering fats in our diet has been to reduce the fat-soluble vitamins that are essential for proper growth and structural development.

In the 1920s and '30s, Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist practicing in Cleveland, Ohio, began to notice changes in the health of his young patients’ teeth and their health in general. Compared to the teeth of their parents’ generation, he began to see crooked teeth and more decay. He also saw more allergies, asthma, and infectious diseases. Dr. Price decided to travel the world examining teeth and evaluating the general health of populations still eating their traditional diets. He discovered that the diets of people eating their traditional foods contained 10 times more fat-soluble vitamins than the contemporary diet of that time, which had begun to include more refined foods and sugar. Ten times more fat-soluble vitamins in the traditional diets—that’s a lot! 

The fat-soluble vitamins in our diet have continued to decline since Dr. Price’s time. Our diets are even lower in fats and contain more processed, sugary foods. Low-nutrient foods, which include refined grains, manufactured oils, and added sugar, have displaced the once-healthy diet of the American people. The consumption of fat-soluble nutrients has declined dramatically as fats have been demonized and declared the cause of heart disease and other chronic illnesses.

Let’s take a look at why we need all the fat-soluble vitamins we can get. The fat-soluble vitamins we recognize are vitamins A, D, E, and K2. The medical profession has recently devoted a lot of attention to the fat-soluble vitamin D3. Maybe your doctor has even mentioned that you are deficient. We now know that low levels of vitamin D contribute to a variety of illnesses, such as infections, depression, cancer, diabetes, and auto-immune diseases. Wow, that's a lot of sickness from one deficiency. 

While doctors may be newly concerned about low levels of this one fat-soluble vitamin, it is only a reflection of low levels in our bodies of ALL the fat-soluble vitamins. Think of vitamin D as “the canary in the coal mine”, meaning that if your vitamin D is low, the other fat-soluble vitamins are too. Instead of just focusing on and replacing one nutrient, we need to understand that when one fat-soluble vitamin is low, they are all low, and your body needs to replace all of them with food or supplements.

The fat-soluble vitamins found in fatty foods work in concert with one another to help support the growth and functioning of all the systems in the body. For example, vitamins A and D are part of the process that creates and lays down the collagen matrix, which is the principal building block of cartilage (that’s the tissue that is found in your nose and ears lobes). Collagen also makes up bone, teeth, and connective tissue. A third vitamin, K2, then directs the body to deposit calcium onto that collagen matrix. So you see how fat-soluble vitamins work together to create and maintain healthy teeth and bones. 

So what might this mean to you, that vitamins A and D help create the matrix of collagen for bone, and then vitamin K2 directs the placement of calcium onto that matrix? Is it possible that our recent increase in osteoporosis is related to a decline in these three fat-soluble vitamins in our diet? Yep, the lack of these fat soluble vitamins is a major contributor to weak and fragile bones! Not something you want to have happen to you as you age!

Fat-soluble vitamins are vital to your body structure and organ systems. So where do we get them? They are found primarily in fat-containing foods. A major source of fat-soluble vitamins is animal meat and products such as milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, and eggs.  Beyond that, whole grain products, wheat germ, green leafy vegetables, nuts, and seeds are great sources of fat-soluble vitamin E. Notice that all these fat-containing foods sound really yummy!

In our next episode we’ll take a look at the fat-soluble vitamins one by one and examine why they are important for proper growth and functioning.

Until next time, this is Dr. DeLaney reminding you to eat real food!