How We Came to Believe that Fats Are Bad for Us
Video Transcript
By now you must be asking, How did it happen that we have been literally “fed” incorrect information about fats and cholesterol? The idea that healthy fats are nutritious and chock full of vitamins essential to our structures and functioning is the complete opposite of what we have been taught. In spite of scientific evidence that fats are good for you, “Eat a low-fat diet” is still the mantra of our “health” culture. “Fats are the devil” is so ingrained in our national consciousness that the concept is difficult to shake. For some people eating butter feels so “sinful” that they must pay for it by eating a reduced-fat diet for the following week.
Remember Daniel Boorstin’s quote from the beginning of this series: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge”? The illusion that has been foisted on us is that saturated fats and cholesterol are bad for us. Why have we been told that fats are bad for you and should be replaced by supposedly healthier processed fats and oils? Who profits from this tale?
Our story of the great distortion about fats starts in the beginning of the 20th century with a massive migration of rural people into the cities. Prior to this time many Americans lived and worked on farms and ranches. They ate diets filled with real butter, cream, bacon, lard, and beef drippings, which they mostly produced themselves and sold to people in cities. Once people moved into town, they often no longer had access to healthy animal products.
Our particular version of the Industrial Revolution caused Americans to gradually lose their connection to traditional foods. Over the past 100 years, we have replaced the traditional fat sources that people cooked with for thousands of years. For those thousands of years human beings lived and ate without heart attacks, with very little cancer, and without diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or auto-immune diseases. Our ancestors ate fats from both plants and animals that contain vital nutrients for growth, reproduction, and maintaining the health of all our organ systems. We have replaced those real fats with man-made ones created by chemically altering natural products.
In the beginning of the 19th century the leading causes of death were infectious illnesses such as tuberculosis and pneumonia. “Death by heart disease” described a slow gradual decline in heart function due to a serious case of typhoid fever. At a medical conference in 1912, Dr. James Herrick, a physician in Chicago, described a myocardial infarction (heart attack) for the first time. The first heart attack recorded in America using an electrocardiogram was documented in 1918.
Yep, you heard that right, the first recorded heart attack in the United States was in 1918. In 1900 the average person was consuming about 18 pounds of butter per year—that’s five teaspoons a day. In the chart below you can track the high butter consumption in the early part of the 1900s followed by a steep decline in the early ‘40s. Also starting in the 1940s we see a steady rise in margarine consumption that continued into the 1990s. During the first decades of the 20th century, while Americans were eating diets filled with real butter, cream, and lard, heart attacks were a rare phenomenon. Based on our modern indoctrination about killer saturated fats, it is hard to believe that heart attacks were so rare.
By the second decade of the 20th century, public health professionals had begun to notice that something had changed in our national health. By 1930 there were 3,000 deaths a year from heart attacks. Thirty years later, in 1960, that rate had skyrocketed to 300,000 deaths per year—an alarming increase! Suddenly heart attack had become the leading cause of death in the United States, and no one knew why. Death by cardiovascular disease continues to be the #1 cause of death in the United States, accounting for 800,000 deaths per year. What could have precipitated an epidemic in a chronic disease in such a short time?
Changes had begun to take place in our food supply years before we began to see changes in our health. We have mentioned the vast migration into cities of rural people, who thereby lost their connection to producing and eating healthy fats. But where did the substitute fats and oils come from? And how were people convinced that they were better (since they certainly didn’t taste better)?
Napoleon III was actually responsible for the development of the first fake fat back in 1869. He wanted a cheap substitute for butter to feed his troops and the lower classes, and oleomargarine was born! Originally oleomargarine was made from beef tallow, but in 1871 it began to be manufactured from cottonseed oil, an even cheaper way to make a food-like product. The new spread, now simply called margarine, became popular with the public in the 1880s and is still eaten today. Margarine is now made from a variety of vegetable oils and is still marketed as being healthier than real butter, which it is NOT!
Fast forward to the turn of the 20th century, when butter was still preferred by most people because they could make it at home and it was tastier than the manufactured margarine. In 1911 Proctor and Gamble introduced a new product called Crisco® to replace the lard (fat rendered from a pig) traditionally used in cooking. Crisco® was originally developed for making soaps and candles. It was primarily made from cottonseed oil and hardened by a process called hydrogenation. Sounds really delicious, eh? When electricity came into use, which made candles obsolete for lighting, Crisco® manufacturers needed another market for their product. Bleaching, emulsifying, and deodorizing Crisco® made it resemble lard and, voila!, it could be used for cooking.
The marketing for Crisco® focused on “replacing greasy animal fats with a flakey vegetable product”. Grocery stores, also new in the early 20th century, began to fill their shelves with Crisco®. Free cookbooks promoted the value of cooking with the new, healthy vegetable fat. Procter and Gamble advertising appealed to the housewife who wanted to be more modern, portraying Crisco® as a healthier, more economical, cleaner, and more enlightened substitute for lard.
Gradually, beginning in the early 1900s, store-bought margarine and Crisco®, processed liquid oils, refined grains, and sugar replaced the healthier farm-raised foods that had previously comprised the American diet. During this same period, Cleveland dentist Dr. Weston A. Price began to notice more cavities and dental malformations in his patients, who had begun to consume more processed oils, flour, and sugars. In addition, they suffered from increased asthma, allergies, and infectious diseases.
The huge increase in new major illnesses in America in the first quarter of the 20th century—starting with that first recorded heart attack in 1918—caused tremendous concern in the public health community. In the 1920s and ‘30s, various ideas were proposed as to the possible cause of the rapid increase in death from heart attacks. Two theories were proposed:
One theory stated that dietary changes—the decrease in eating animal fats and increased consumption of hydrogenated vegetable oils—were causing the decline in public health. To solve the problem we should go back to eating foods from our traditional diets.
The second theory, known as the Lipid Hypothesis, declared that people were eating too much cheese, butter, and eggs, and that the resulting increase in blood cholesterol was responsible for the rise in heart disease. The idea was that saturated fats made cholesterol go up, and saturated fats and cholesterol both contributed to the plaques in arteries that cause heart disease.
This chart from the Department of Agriculture shows that the Lipid Hypothesis was a false equivalency from the beginning; consumption of butter and lard was declining steeply as the rate of heart attacks was skyrocketing. Note also the steady increase in consumption of margarine and manufactured oils as the cases of heart disease are rising. Could there be an association here?
Research began to appear that promoted the notion that fat and cholesterol were causing heart disease. In 1912 (right about the time that Crisco® started to be marketed to the public), Russian researcher Nikolai Anichkov claimed to have proved that cholesterol was the primary factor in initiating heart disease. He had managed to create atherosclerosis (fatty plaques) in the arteries of rabbits (which are vegetarian, by the way) by feeding them egg yolks and purified cholesterol. What he and subsequent researchers failed to mention is that they dissolved the cholesterol in vegetable oil, a likelier cause of the fatty plaques in the rabbits.
One of the early papers opposing the idea that fats and cholesterol cause heart disease came from Drs. Lange and Sperry, Harvard pathologists whose research did not agree with the Lipid Hypothesis. They published a paper in 1936 based on autopsies clearly showing that levels of cholesterol did not correlate with levels of atherosclerosis in coronary arteries. A person could have plaques in their arteries with or without high cholesterol. There was no relationship whatsoever! Over the next few years many articles were published that presented similar data disproving the Lipid Hypothesis. Unfortunately, they have been tucked away in the archives of medicine and ignored. The Lipid Hypothesis (and the promotion of cholesterol as the “villain”) won out and has been the dominant “health” message for over 70 years.
The concept of saturated fats and cholesterol as our arch enemy has become so entrenched in our culture that the idea of returning to eating real foods such as butter, cheese, and eggs seems outlandish! In our next episode we will dig deeper into how medical science and various organizations became involved in the whole scheme of demonizing naturally occurring fats and cholesterol.
This is Dr. DeLaney reminding you to eat real food, like your great grandmother did!