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.
study the problem of rising rates of heart attacks. But ego got the better of him.
At his first scientific meeting he presented the idea that in countries where people ate more animal fat, people died of heart disease more often, suggesting a possible causal relationship. But his statistical work was so sloppy (see figure on the following page) that he was lambasted by his peers. Rather than cleaning up his act, Keys vowed vengeance:
“I’ll show those guys.”232 More than anything else, it seems, Keys wanted folks to think he had single-handedly discovered the cause of heart disease. And so did the country’s margarine producers, who in Keys had found the perfect spokesperson. Though Keys’s work failed to convince professional scientists (at least for the first decade or two), the margarine industry knew he still had a shot at convincing the man on the street. If the public thought butter and other animal fats would “clog their arteries,” they could be persuaded to buy margarine instead.
It wasn’t long before the American Heart Association, which depends on large donations of cash from the vegetable oil industry, jumped on the bandwagon with Keys. They took his sloppy statistics and ran with it, eventually convincing most doctors that steak is a “heart attack on a plate” and that margarine made from hydrogenated vegetable oils (full of trans fat) was healthy. Within a decade, grocery store shelves were loaded with ready-to-eat foods, and Americans were buying. No longer insisting on fresh food from small farmers right in our neighborhoods, we’d been convinced that products made in distant factories were safer, healthier, and better. And they were also cheaper. But even Keys had his doubts about eating them.
HOW KEYS FAKED IT
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Keys blamed natural fat consumption for heart attacks. But the United States, England, Canada, and Australia had the highest levels of margarine consumption. Keys never mentions margarine in his famous “Six-Countries Study” and the deception was never exposed. Keys is still considered to be a hero of modern medicine.
“Oops! Everything I Said About Saturated Fat Was Really About Margarine.” —Paraphrasing Ancel Keys, Ph.D.
By 1961, under increasing scientific scrutiny, Keys began to waver in his support for his own (now publicly accepted) diet-heart hypothesis.233 Scientists had pointed out Dr. Keys’s misleading use of scientific terms.
In public, he fingered animal fat as the culprit behind the rising rates of heart attacks. But in his laboratory and human experiments, he didn’t use animal fat.234 His subjects were fed margarine made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. And what was in the margarine? Trans fat—
a full 48 percent!
Trans fats are the infamous artery-hardening molecules that have
been banned from restaurants in New York City and elsewhere due to their now well-known associations with heart disease. These fats do not exist in foods that nature makes. (Trans describes a chemical bond between two molecules, not a molecule per se. More on this below.) While nature makes healthy versions of trans-containing fats, the trans fat that’s been banned is the byproduct of an industrial process called hydrogenation. And so, for Keys to conclude from studies that used hydrogenated vegetable oil that animal fat causes heart disease is utterly nonsensical.
Unfortunately, the public never heard the straight story. Because margarine also contains saturated fat (made during the same hydrogenation process that generates trans fat), the food industry was handed the opening they needed to put an anti-saturated-fat spin on Keys’s findings. Ignoring the presence of trans fat (and other distorted fats in margarine), spokesmen simply blamed saturated fat. And on TV, Keys equated saturated fat with animal fat, completing the deception.235 This ingenious spin on the facts is akin to poisoning rats with strychnine-laced milk and then blaming the deaths on the milk.
The anti-saturated fat, anti-cholesterol ball was rolling along nicely, and there was so much money being made selling “healthy” low-cholesterol, low-fat processed foods, that the rolling ball wasn’t going to be easy to stop. All the news reports you’ve heard on the hazards of saturated fat and cholesterol are supported in large part by studies that evaluated the effects of hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is full of unnatural molecules that aren’t found in butter, steak, or any natural food.236
With so much junk science saturating the media, professionals who give nutritional advice need to go beyond the sound bites to discover the truth for themselves. While it’s easy to go with the flow and tell patients to “cut out animal fat,” doing so turns well-meaning healthcare practitioners into unwitting participants in an ongoing campaign to sell high profit-margin manmade substitutes for natural foods—substitutes which, in turn, make people sick.
Lipid Scientists to the Rescue
In an earlier chapter, I suggested that our health took a turn for the worse when we stopped talking about food the way farmers and chefs do and adapted the language of scientists. The scientists are not the problem. The problem arises when we use scientific terms without a true understanding of what we’re saying. Case in point: the story I just told you about the media scaring us away from saturated fat coming from foods like butter and cream when the food in the studies actually was margarine and was, therefore, loaded with trans fats that only recently—
fifty years down the road—we’ve learned are bad for our health.
These days we so frequently hear such terms as trans and polyunsaturated it’s easy to forget that those are chemical descriptions of compounds with specific types of molecular bonds and conformations—
details most non-chemists wouldn’t be able to describe. So when the young man restocking salad dressing on grocery store shelves insists the dressing is healthy because it’s high in polyunsaturates, or your server at the local restaurant extols the merits of omega-3 in canola, it’s best to take this nutritional advice with a grain of salt. In 1961, when Ancel Keys brought national attention to lipids and their role in human health, he was hailed as Time magazine’s Man of the Year. In the sixty-plus years since the lipid discussion took center stage of the nutrition conversation, the heart-health cover stories have reflected a consistent fascination with fats, but they have delivered a completely inconsistent message:
“Cholesterol: And Now the Bad News” was a cover story in 1984, arguing that eating cholesterol is bad for you.237 But by 2014, Time reported, in an article entitled “Ending the War on Fat,” that doctors were now suggesting butter is okay.238 What—or who—are we supposed to believe?
In my view we should only listen to the group of people who actually spend their careers studying fat: lipid scientists, who focus solely on learning more about various lipids (fats) and their respective roles in human health. In the decades we’ve been trying out different kinds of fats in different combinations—from Rip Essylstein’s near-zero fat,
Engine 2 Diet, to the South Beach Diet (only fish and plant-based dietary fats), to Atkins’s emphasis on animal fats—the American public has never heard from a single lipid scientist. That’s a real shame, because lipid scientists have plenty to say on the matter. And because they know more on this topic than anyone else, what they have to tell you could save your life.
A Cause of Heart Disease You Might Have Missed
If there’s such a thing as a lipid science rock star, then I would consider Gerhard Spiteller to be something like Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, and Mick Jagger rolled into one. This brilliant Austrian scientist has been quietly getting to the bottom of the role of fats in heart attacks for nearly half a century. A superstar among super-geeks whose resume includes teaching and research positions at MIT, Innsbruck, and other prestigious universities, he is lead author of over 130 published scientific articles.
While other members of the lipid research community have studied and written extensively about lipid peroxidation and its potential role in arteriosclerosis, it was Dr. Spiteller, who, in his 2000 article, “Oxidation of Linoleic Acid in Low-Density Lipoprotein: An Important Event in Atherogenesis,” definitively points us in the right direction.239 In this meticulously researched article, Dr. Spiteller makes the case that it is processed polyunsaturated fats, not saturated fat or cholesterol, that deserve the blame for the stiffening of arteries throughout the body.
(We’ll learn more about what polyunsaturated fats are, and where they come from, later in this chapter.)
I’m going to guess that until now you’d never heard of Dr. Spiteller.
Lipid scientists, as a rule, don’t land their own TV shows. They are not asked to comment on the latest medical story on morning news programs. They do not wind up on the cover of Time or in any other mainstream magazine. Unlike living the life of a heart surgeon, or a brain surgeon, or a cardiologist, spending your career in a windowless lab studying fats isn’t likely to impress people at a dinner party. Let’s face it: for most us, “lipid scientist” is hardly synonymous with “sexy.”
This explains why the general public—even those who study nutrition and health—don’t usually get to hear what lipid scientists have to add to the nutrition dialogue, a conversation that, at least lately, largely concerns itself with the good-fat/bad-fat question. But what about other researchers and medical professionals? Surely, even the jocks of the medical world would take the time to acquaint themselves with the latest findings coming from those lipid researchers who know far more about how fats behave in the body than anyone else, right?
Wrong. By and large, the guy driving the Porsche Carrera to the surgical suite to thread another stent into another artery of another patient is almost guaranteed to be thirty years, or more, behind in his knowledge of nutrition and its role in the etiology of the arterial disease that, indirectly, paid for his house, his upcoming trip to Italy, and his children’s Ivy League college educations. In fact, by the time you’ve finished reading this chapter, it’s likely that you’ll know far more about the causes of heart disease than your local heart surgeon or cardiologist.
You’ll understand what lipid scientists have been telling us—and what the research has supported for years—cholesterol and saturated fat are not your heart’s enemy; industrial fat products, the vegetable oils, are.
Industrial fat products like vegetable oils are toxic to your arteries because they contain delicate polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) that are particularly prone to oxidative damage, especially when exposed to heat and when separated from the antioxidants that would otherwise help protect them from that oxidative damage. I know, that’s nowhere near as catchy as “cholesterol clogs your arteries.” But it is what the research evidence supports.
So, as lipid scientists have long argued, I submit that natural fats and cholesterol have been a part of the human diet for millennia and are not the problem. The historically recent rise in arteriosclerosis and heart disease is the result of an historically recent invention of the food industry—refined, bleached, and deodorized vegetable oils. By revealing how certain fatty acids are changed by heating and processing, Dr.
Spiteller offers us a chemically indisputable definition of good fats versus bad.
Over the rest of this chapter, I’ll discuss these concepts and show how eating heat-damaged fatty acids leads to plaque building up in your arteries. But first I want to show you the consequences of Keys’s pet theory, and why anyone who villifies saturated fat is helping to support both the sickness and the junk-food industries.