Kabir in Northern Africa (see illustration opposite the title page of this book). More to the point, it carries the same information to their cells.
The gray-white substance pumped from our sad cows? Not so much.
Fortunately, you don’t need to join a nomadic tribe in the desert to start eating better. All you need to do is follow the recipes laid out in any truly traditional cookbook. In Chapter 10, I will discuss in detail the foundational elements of the Deep Nutrition philosophy so that you can pick the best recipes from those available in your favorite cookbooks and on the Internet.
But before we get into which foods you should seek out, I would like to talk to you about two ingredients so harmful and so intrinsic to the modern American diet that with the single act of identifying these troublemakers, you put yourself miles ahead of the game.
effects in newborns, then they would be kapu for expectant moms. Every indigenous society honored such a list; to ignore it could spell disaster for mother or child. Coming up, we’ll see why vegetable oil and sugar are the real culprits for diseases most doctors blame on chance, or—even more absurdly—on the consumption of natural fats. Once you learn what they do inside your body, I hope you’ll put them both on the top of your family’s kapu list.
CHAPTER 7 Good Fats and Bad
How the Cholesterol Theory Created a Sickness Epidemic
If we ever want to settle the good-fat/bad-fat debate, we need to listen to the lipid scientists.
Lipid scientists have been trying to tell us for decades that saturated fat and cholesterol are not the problem.
Oxidized polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) is dangerous because it is chemically unstable.
Eliminating toxic fats can make you virtually heart-attack proof.
Your lipoprotein particle size is the best gauge of your risk of heart attack.
When I was fresh out of medical school, if you had asked me what causes heart disease, I would have answered, “Fat and cholesterol, of course.” I felt confident in this advice not only because it was what I had been taught, but because it seemed to make intuitive sense; I could picture fat accumulating inside a person’s artery, gradually choking it closed like cooking grease in a pipe. Moreover, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Cardiologists, and other organizations endorsed this cholesterol theory of heart disease.
But as I started practicing medicine, one thing about this theory nagged me: Why, if cholesterol is so deadly, were so many of my oldest patients enjoying excellent health after a lifetime of consuming butter, eggs, and red meat?
Not long ago, physicians and scientists at the center of establishment medicine started asking similar questions in light of increasing evidence that the cholesterol issue warranted revisiting. In 2001, a few nutrition
scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health went so far as to suggest that “the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences.”225 Further, they contended that the low-fat, anti-cholesterol campaign might not only be a flop as far as fighting obesity and diabetes were concerned, it could be making both epidemics worse.
Thanks to Michael Pollan and authors of several recent books, who cite this article and others like it, the reading public has witnessed cracks forming in the foundation of modern nutritional thought.226, 227,
228 As more researchers discover all manner of evidence that animal fat has health-promoting effects (such data has now been published in dozens of academic journals), the pressure is building toward a sea of change in organized medicine.229 Until that change comes, however, your doctor is unlikely to contradict the official guidelines. Only when current guidelines change to reflect better science will the average doctor’s advice on nutrition cease to put patients at risk for those
“unintended health consequences.”
By the end of this chapter, you may be convinced that there is little reason to fear cholesterol. My hope is that, at the very least, you will recognize that the cholesterol theory of heart disease is far from unassailable and that when your doctor admonishes you to “get your numbers down,” you need not accept this advice without objection.
The other thing I want you to understand is that a necessary outgrowth of the indictment of cholesterol is a rejection of the traditional, natural fats that have sustained humankind for thousands of generations. It’s a little like the idea Nestle successfully used in the 1940s to sell infant formula to my grandmother and many other women, claiming it was “more perfect than breastmilk.”230 Those who mean to replace natural, traditional foods with modern-day food-like products in the name of health are championing the position that nature doesn’t know best; a corporation does. This is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence—a burden they have failed to meet.
So why do we fall for it?
To understand how easy it is to sell us completely bogus ideas, to get
us begging for products that we barely know anything about, we will begin with the most successful sales pitch in the history of medicine, delivered by a man regarded by many as the hero of modern nutritional thought.