Praise The Lard: How Fat Was Framed

Saturated fat has been the biggest public health danger apart from smoking for five decades. Ever since the second world war, we’ve known that it caused atherosclerosis, which in turn leads to heart disease, strokes and damaged circulation. It’s just an unfortunate passenger in foods like red meat and fish. If only we could cut it out of our diets altogether, we’d all be a lot healthier.

The trouble is, not a word of that is true. Not one.

So why has it been demonised for so long? And if fat isn’t to blame for heart disease, strokes and obesity, what is?

Fat and atherosclerosis

The ‘lipid hypothesis’ states that saturated fat causes atherosclerosis. This is a hardening and thickening of the arterial walls that narrows the blood vessels, leading to higher blood pressure – inevitably, since the same volume of blood must travel down a thinner tube.

Atherosclerosis is very real, and it affects over 15 million people in America alone. But there’s no real evidence that it’s caused by saturated fat.

Why do people think it is?

In 1913, a Russian physiologist fed high doses of cholesterol to rabbits and found that it was associated with atherosclerotic changes. In rabbits. At several hundred times the normal human dose. The next step was to start looking for atherosclerosis in people with heart disease  - and for high-fat diets in people with both. Al three were commonly found together.

Fast forward to 1948 and the American Heart Association was building a case for the ‘Prudent Diet,’ replacing lard and butter with corn oil and soybean oil. We’ve been hearing the same song for all the decades since.

Trouble is, there’s never been any really good evidence that atherosclerosis is eve associated with heart disease deaths – or that it’s caused by saturated fat. We’re looking at a massive case of ‘post hoc ergo proctor hoc’ –just because they were found together, people assumed a connection when there never was one. Japanese natives had a prevalence of atherosclerosis of about 65% in 1952, according to a major study at the time – compared with Americans at 75%, even though the Japanese diet was much lower in animal fats. When corpses from 14 countries around the world were autopsied for atherosclerosis, they all had similar prevalences, no matter where they came from. They came from countries with high fat and low fat diets, and from countries with high and low rates of heart disease.

Fat and Heart Attacks and Strokes

What about heart attacks and strokes? Just because atherosclerosis isn’t the culprit doesn’t mean fat doesn’t cause heart attacks and strokes. This belief is so ingrained that it’s easy to play on it in shockingly ignorant ways. I recently saw a presentation by a man seeking to make converts to vegetarianism make the following argument: ‘I don’t want to eat any fats that are solid at room temperature, because they’ll stay solid in my arteries.’ That’s not the ‘lipid hyposthesis’ –it’s just nonsense. (How long does lard, for instance, stay solid at body temperature? Hold some and find out!) But the lipid hypothesis is so ingrained that it’s easy to sell this stuff.

Fat has been shown to be associated with heart attacks and strokes – but the science was poor. In 1953, Ancel Keys published a study of six countries that showed a correlation between fat consumption and deaths from heart attacks.

So Fat Doesn't Cause Heart Disease?

Put all that back in and there sure is a correlation between fat and heart disease. The more fat you eat, according to the ’22-country’ study, the LESS likely you are to die from heart disease.

But... Doesn't Fat Make You Fat?

What about obesity? There’s an obesity epidemic raging right now that’s absolutely off the charts: one in three adult Americans is obese, and obesity is life threatening. The last time one in three people in a country the size of the United States was afflicted with the same life-threatening illness was the Black Death.

That’s obvious, right?

Trouble is, it has more in common with sympathetic magic than with serious dietary advice. Eating fat isn’t a matter of pouring fat into your body, which then stays there. Complex metabolic interactions are happening between your body’s fat stores and the rest of your metabolism all the time, and fat isn’t metabolically inert as once thought. It’s also not taken straight out of your digestive system and stuck onto your abdomen, obscuring your six-pack and threatening an early grave.

When did the obesity epidemic in the USA start? In 1977. That’s the year obesity levels, flat or tilting slowly up until that time, pitched upward – and they’ve only accelerated since then. Something must have happened in 1977, right?

That would be the publication of low-fat dietary guidelines and the intervention of pressure groups to push a low-fat agenda in restaurants, hospitals, schools –everywhere, in fact.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Fat is a slimming aid.

See Also: Fat Vs. Carbs: Which One Is Really To Blame?

Fat and Margarine

Where did all the impetus for a low-fat diet come from? Why did Ancel Keys falsify his data? Why did America pitch downward into a trough of obesity and take the rest of the world with it? Why were we all recommended the diabetic diet for more than forty years?

Crisco – for Crystalised Corn Oil – was designed as an industrial lubricant, then used as animal feed to fatten livestock for slaughter. When its popularity declined after the Second World War its secondary business as a shortening for baking expanded and pretty soon it was in the margarine business, selling its hydrogenated vegetable fat product as a heart-healthy alternative to lard and butter.