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The Story of Fat

Let me tell you the story of how one man accidentally gave us the obesity epidemic, kept cardiovascular disease growing, made billions for the pharmaceutical industry and programmed us to be afraid of fat and cholesterol. All the benefits from skim milk, low fat snacks, and cholesterol lowering Cheerios that were sold to you are based on hypotheses made by a man named Ancel Keys.

The idea that we should avoid saturated fat and cholesterol at all costs comes from the Keys’ “Diet-Heart Hypothesis” and “Lipid Hypothesis”. These ideas come from him analyzing the data from 7 countries which showed that when you plotted incidence of heart attacks against fat consumption you see that the countries that ate more fat had more heart attacks. It was simple, you could draw a straight line through the data points which showed more fat equaled more heart attacks.

Pretty straight forward, you eat more fat, you get fat, your cholesterol rises, your arteries get clogged, and you have a heart attack. Ancel Keys got this accepted by the USDA, the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association and off went the anti-fat anti-cholesterol movement.

The only catch here is that there weren’t only 7 countries for which data was available, there were 22 countries. When you factor in the remaining countries there is no straight line to be drawn. Maybe Keys had access to the remaining data, maybe he didn’t, but he sure worked fast to have his recommendations put in place.

The lack of good evidence didn’t go unnoticed, though: Dr. George Mann, one of the researchers on the Framingham study which was actually supposed to bolster this cholesterol theory, said, “Dietary fat is not the determinant of either high cholesterol or coronary heart disease” and ‘”the diet heart hypothesis is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the American public.“

That’s a bold claim but by the way, it’s still called “hypothesis” because it’s never been proven. You’re probably up to date with recent health information and maybe even OK with the idea of a low carb diet, but chances are you’re still not completely comfortable with fat.

After all, we’ve been programmed to associate saturated fats with “Artery Clogging” and we’ve seen the commercials where they do something like clog a drain with bacon fat. Also Butter, Lard and Coconut Oil solidify at room temperature so it’s pretty easy logic that those solid fats will clog your arteries.

The problem with these images is that you can melt those saturated fats easily in your hand, like I’m doing here, and the temperature in your body is much hotter; and the thing that clogs your arteries resulting in a heart attack is not an accumulation of fat.

Fat doesn’t even stay intact in the body- your stomach bile works kind of like the dish liquid I’m dropping here. It breaks the fat up into these small droplets.. Then it gets wrapped inside carrier molecules called lipoproteins. Fat is never technically even in the bloodstream, it’s always transported inside of a lipoprotein shell.

When you look at health from an evolutionary standpoint, the concept of engineering fat out of our foods for our health doesn’t make much sense. Our brains, which is what got us so far, are the most metabolically expensive organs that we have: consuming 25% of the adult metabolic budget.

To adjust for the high energy cost of a large brain, our guts had to shrink because they too required a lot of energy to run. So, our gut became less efficient at getting enough energy from fibrous foods and was more dependent on more bio-available, nutrient-dense and energy dense foods.

Cooking food of course was an important development for us too, but fat still takes first place for most calorie dense nutrient at 9 calories per gram. So fat would then be a very valuable macronutrient that we would get as much of as our environment allowed.

There is even evidence that suggests homo sapiens may have eaten most of the fat on an animal before even touching the meat. Sure we have plenty of fruits and vegetables that have been cultivated to be more nutrient and calorie dense and we spend much less time moving around, so ravenously eating fat is hardly necessary.

However it’s not very plausible that a macronutrient that used to be so important to us is now killing so many of us . Timothy Olsen showcases the efficiency of fat in spectacular fashion. He holds the record for the Western 100 Endurance run, a 100 mile ultra distance race in California that includes an 18,000 feet climb and 23,000 feet descent.

He said he used to consume dozens of sports gels throughout his races to keep him going, but switched to a low carb, high fat diet for more stable energy; “Towards the end of the race y’know after lots of heat and lots of gels and whatnot, I ended up taking a crap in the woods like 20 some times.

That’s when I switched to more primal like grain free diet, I had huge success with it” You might have stopped and thought “How can fat not be the problem? I ate a plant based diet and reversed my atherosclerosis!”Living in Japan, I’m very aware of how healthy a high carbohydrate diet can be, especially a primarily plant based one like the Okinawan people’s who frequently live to be 100 while less than 8% of their calories come from fat.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to this. Despite our bodies preferring the energy dense fat, this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol needs to be reduced at all costs became medical dogma. However, not only does our body want fat, it doesn’t want to reduce cholesterol.

Cholesterol is incredibly important: we need it for the membranes of our cells, we need it to make brain cells, we need it to make several important hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

Probably due to things like that bacon fat commercial, the common assumption is that fat and cholesterol build up on the arterial wall. This isn’t quite how it works. Where the build up takes place is actually under the arterial wall.

The process leading up to a heart attack starts with a damaged, inflamed arterial wall and then the body wants to mend that damage, much like it would want to mend a cut you might have, so it sends cholesterol and other things like calcium, and fibrin in an attempt to seal up the hole.

Sure cholesterol is found inside this inflamed area, but you would blame getting burned for your blister, not the fluid that builds up. Blaming cholesterol instead of the inflammation is like blaming one of the firemen instead of the fire. Back to the Okinawan people: they have such a low incidence of heart disease because they’re not eating foods that cause inflammation so atherosclerosis never develops.

Of course they live long: they eat locally grown, organic, fiber rich vegetables designed to nourish them, not optimized for profit and laden with pesticides. Keep in mind by the way that the saturated fat our homo sapien ancestors were getting was from wild animals, (cage free, pasture raised, organic - that is)not from highly processed ham slices in Kraft Food’s “Lunchables” , and certainly not from the butter of cows pumped with hormones while living in cow jail and eating processed corn scrap.

Also they were getting their unsaturated fat in the form of omega-3’s from fish and omega-6’s from nuts, not mostly from Canola seeds that had to be washed in hexane solvent & sodium hydroxide, bleached and then steam injected. Wait a minute, but What if you have too much cholesterol? It doesn’t really matter.

One of the authors of the “The Great Cholesterol Myth,” Dr. Johnny Bowden explained in this lecture that in the Lyon Diet Heart Study they had a group of 605 people with high cholesterol and a very high risk of heart disease. In one group they put them on the Mediterranean diet and in another they recommended they cut saturated fat, reduce cholesterol intake to 300mg per day and follow the “healthy” western diet.

The results? Cardiac death and all cause mortality on the Mediterranean diet was significantly lower than on the low saturated fat diet. After explaining this, Dr. Bowden says “What do you think happened to the cholesterol of the people on the Mediterranean diet? Their cholesterol didn’t budge.

They just stopped dying. Cholesterol had nothing to do with it.” OK so total cholesterol is not a useful piece of information. But what about the HDL “good” cholesterol and the LDL “bad” cholesterol? This concept is also outdated.

In Peter Attia’s wonderfully long and technical talk about cholesterol he explains… “We were taught that LDL cholesterol is the big risk right, if your LDL cholesterol is high, you are at risk for heart disease.

And yet we’re seeing that some of the time that turns out to be patently false. This is a study that looked at 136,000 patients admitted to the hospital for a coronary artery event. And in these patients they looked at LDL cholesterol level and you can see that nearly 50% of them had what you would consider a low LDL cholesterol level” There are a number of different types and sizes of HDL and LDL particles, and what is actually important is to avoid having too many triglycerides sitting in your bloodstream, which are also transported by lipoproteins.

Peter cites studies that show an increase in processed carbohydrates and sugar leads to an increase in the triglyceride concentration. The best way for the subjects to decrease their triglyceride concentration was ironically to go on a higher fat, low carbohydrate diet. Therefore these low-fat products marketed to health conscious people that switch fat for more carbohydrates are directly increasing your risk for heart disease.

We trusted you, Snackwell’s One quick thing: If that last part had you thinking “how in the world could sugar, instead of fat, lead to a higher triglyceride concentration?” Take a moment to look at Doug McGuff’s thorough explanation of glucose metabolism here or you can see my cliffnotes version here.

It wasn’t like nobody knew that the culprit behind our health problems wasn’t so much fat, but sugar. British physiologist John Yudkin wrote a book in 1972 “Pure, White and Deadly: The Problem of Sugar” which correctly warned that the consumption of sugar is what is really dangerous to our health, an argument he had made since at least 1957.

Nonetheless, in 1977, the US government gave us our new low fat healthy guidelines. and What’s happened since then? Hospitalizations for Heart Failure went up and heart disease is still the leading cause of death in the world. In fact, when it comes to weight gain, the data suggests people started gaining weight immediately after the guidelines came out.

“Hey Clinton, get back to work!” “Make me!” We now understand that: 1 Knowing total cholesterol as well as “good” and “bad” cholesterol are virtually irrelevant to your health 2 Reducing inflammation, and triglyceride concentration in the blood is what is actually important for avoiding heart disease and 3 The real things you need to limit are sugar and processed carbohydrates.

Despite all this, the same guidelines are still in place. What is worse than that is we’re still being prescribed Statin drugs, whose harmful effects are a constant testament to how important cholesterol is for the body.

Some of you might even have been prescribed a statin. If so, you might want to ask your doctor what the number needed to treat for statin drugs is. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that the number needed to treat is the number of people that have to take the drug before one person actually benefits from it. “

…So The number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? Three hundred. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.

So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in 5 percent of the patients and they include terrible things – debilitating muscle and joint pain. But now you’re thinking well 5%, not very likely it’s going to happen to me, I’ll still take the drug. but wait a minute.

300 people take the drug, right? One person’s helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that’s 15 people. You are 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.“

By the way, remember how I said cholesterol is important for producing sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen? What do you think the second highest revenue prescription drug is for Pfizer after Lipitor, which is the #1 prescribed statin? Viagra comes in right after Lipitor.

There’s only an 8% difference between the two. Let me end this video with a rule of thumb you can use to pick out your food: Just think about how much something has been screwed with before you make the decision to eat that.

For example: coca Leaves in their natural state are quite harmless, the farmers in the Andes have chewed on them for hundreds of years for a small boost in energy. However, when you process the hell out of them, you get cocaine.

Eating a lot of sugar beets probably isn’t so bad for you, but if you boil them in water to make a crude syrup, then wash that solution with calcium hydroxide and proceed to refine it with 6 different boilers… maybe you shouldn’t put the resulting white powder in your coffee every day.

You can apply this idea to anything from processed cheese to packages of so called “whole wheat bread”. This goes for fats and meat too. If Jack the cow just had to walk around and eat grass, the food that comes from him is going to be more nutritional than Jeff the cow’s if Jeff had to be confined to a tiny space, given all sorts of antibiotics, and fed corn all his life. Here’s a fun fact: Livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics in the united states.

They need these antibiotics to survive the ill health effects caused by confinement and the acidosis that results from a corn based diet - a diet which is completely unnatural for a cow to eat. I’m not here to sell you on any one diet or argue what macronutrient ratio is best.

However, I can tell you for certain that this sugary processed crap that has somehow found its way into every store on the planet isn’t what our bodies need. It’s more likely that our recent health problems came from the nutritional sacrifices that were made for better profits, and not from a basic macronutrient like fat that we have been eating for centuries.