Can you think of a fundamental reason not to expect that it's healthy and good, not particularly to be limited below what you have a taste for?
Stop and think about it. Forget everything you think you know (which, if we're talking knowledge, is probably not much: many are just regurgitating). Why would it not be healthful, beneficial? Because it's so tasty and we're depraved by nature, naturally seeking mostly those things from "the devil's playground?" Could it be, rather, that it's because it's so good for us that we have a such a taste for it? And then, if it turns out that it actually is good for us, does that not make the "experts" and "authorities" more evil than well meaning, and, does it not make us more childlike and foolish than inquisitive and honest?
Why wouldn't it be healthful, naturally, when you find it in large percentages in the animal fats associated with all meats? You even find it in the animal fat associated with human meat, in roughly the same proportion as pigs (i.e., lard). ...And what of a "lard ass," to whom you might recommend a low-cal, low-fat diet? Would that be advisable if saturated fat is unhealthy? After all, the fat is locked away in that large rump. A low-cal, low-fat diet is just going to release it into the bloodstream where it can wreak its havoc.
If we were all thinking straight -- perhaps like a hunter-gatherer all on his own, responsible on a daily basis to look around, observe, think, integrate, plan, exercise extreme caution -- and all that just to eat --we might scoff at the notion of animal fat being "bad for us." In comparison, supermarket cart-wheeling moderns are woefully ignorant -- perhaps even those hunters and fishermen among us. Sure, you can get out there for a weekend or so, but do you go without any groceries? Could you do it for life?
So, would you expect these super informed and experienced HGs to eschew animal products in favor of leaves and various fibers? You wouldn't, would you? What you would expect is for them to go after the most dense nutrition they could safely source, which would be various animals of all kinds -- along with their saturated fat. And they've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, which is very clear from the anthropological record. Moreover, their skeletal remains are larger in stature, with healthier, straighter teeth when compared to those of ancient agricultural populations.
And, so, given our millions of years of evolution, one would naturally expect saturated fat to be not only "OK," or, "taken in moderation," but actually healthful! Really healthful. One would expect it to be quite an astounding shocker if that wasn't so. In fact, the level of unabashed shock at such speculation should have been so profound as to have demanded decades of contradictory-free hypotheses, gold standard research...leading up to infallible proof...before even giving it a second thought.
Instead, we we were led down a fool's path by opportunistic miscreants who, to this very day, ignore what honest people like Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD, have been saying for years. Not only that. These researchers are so opportunistic that they actually obfuscate with purposefully flawed studies designed to get the results they set out to get in the first place, which isn't science, but rather the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, just to keep the crap afloat. Dr. Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths and Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You has up a three part series on saturated fat at Spacedoc.net.
- Saturated Fat is Good for You - by Uffe Ravnskov MD - Part 1 of 3
- Saturated Fat is Good for You - by Uffe Ravnskov MD - Part 2 of 3
- Saturated Fat is Good for You - by Uffe Ravnskov MD - Part 3 of 3
For several years skeptical scientists including myself have asked the experts on the Swedish National Food Administration for the scientific studies that allow them to warn against saturated fat. Their usual answers have been that "there are thousands of such studies", or they refer to the WHO ( World Health Organization ) guidelines, (1) said to have been written by the world's greatest experts.
The main argument in that document is that saturated fat raises cholesterol, but we now know that high cholesterol is not a disease. What we want to know is if we shorten our lives or if we run a greater risk of getting a heart attack or a stroke by eating too much saturated fat.
Recently the Swedish Food Administration published a list of 72 studies that they claimed were in support of their warnings. Together with eleven colleagues I scrutinized the list and found that only two of them were in support.
Eleven studies did not concern saturated fat at all. Sixteen studies were about saturated fat, but were not in support. Three reviews had ignored all contradictory studies. Eleven studies gave partial or doubtful support. Eight studies concerned reviews of experiments where the treatment included not only a "healthy" diet, but also weight reduction, smoking cessation and physical exercise. So how did they know whether the small effect was due to less saturated fat or to something else? Furthermore, all of them had excluded trials with a negative outcome.
Twenty-one studies were about surrogate outcomes. In most of the reports the authors claimed that saturated fat raises cholesterol. But again, high cholesterol is not a disease. Twelve studies were listed because they had shown that people on a diet with much saturated fat and little carbohydrates reacted more slowly on insulin than normally. From that observation the authors claimed that saturated fat causes diabetes, but they had jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Saturated fat does not produce diabetes; on the contrary. More than a dozen experiments have shown that the best diet for people with type 2 diabetes is one with much saturated fat and very little carbohydrates. In a few days their blood sugar normalizes and many of the patients are able to stop their medication. (2)
That's the first part of part 1, so go read the whole series, which isn't very long. You might also want to go read about the generally good health of the highest saturated fat consuming people on the planet, the Tokelauans.
Oh, but there's more. And, since I have to thank Dr. Eades for alerting to these articles via Twitter, I'll thank him for the other link too, which I'll get to in a minute.
In part 2 of Ravnskov's series, he brings to light some research done in India.
For six years Indian researcher Malhotra registered how many died from a heart attack among the more than one million employees of the Indian railways.
According to Malhotra's report employees who lived in Madras had the highest mortality. It was six to seven times higher than in Punjab, the district with the lowest mortality, and they died at a much younger age. But people in Punjab ate almost seventeen times more fat than people from Madras and most of it was animal fat. In addition they smoked much more.(14)
Hmm. Well, there's also this, just out, about how vegetarian Indians are dropping from coronary artery disease at an alarming rate.
Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, India.
The incidence of coronary artery disease (CAD) is increasing at an alarming rate, especially in developing countries, such as India. It is often advocated that a vegetarian lifestyle could reduce the burden of CAD. However, in spite of a majority of Indians being vegetarians, the incidence of CAD is highest in this population. This may be due to deficiency of vitamin B12, a micronutrient, sourced only from animal products.
See how it all comes together? Vegetarianism is a myth, a menace. No wonder they're such bedfellows with that other menace: those with the audacity to sweep aside 2.5 million years of evolution to implicate as unhealthy a core building block of our very bodies.
Curse them all.
You might also like
- Saturated Fat and Coronary Heart Disease, Part II: The Paleo Principle
- Saturated Fat and Coronary Heart Disease, Part I: Introducing Professor Rod Jackson
- “Fraudulent Science”
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Saturated Fat
Please spread the word
And here's The BBC spouting sh1te.
Low-carb diets 'damage arteries'
“For long-term health at least one-third of what we eat should be bread, rice, potatoes, pasta or other starchy food.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8218780.stm
I don't think vegetarians are a menace. The militant of any kind are a menace, not excluding the militant vegetarians or vegans.
Vegetarianism probably developed the same way agriculture developed, as a need of the hour. Indians have been vegetarians for a long time, but they aren't quite militant. Possibly vegetarian diets make people less violent, something to do with some low factor in diet (guessing DHEA).
Vegans and non-traditional vegetarians are probably not getting enough nutrition to build a healthy brain and body, and that brings out their militancy
.
Indians knew exactly how to survive on a vegetarian diet. Unfortunately, the cheap refined oils and the cheap sugar and bad marketing has caused a drastic change in food habits of india. They have lost the vitamins that they got from butter/ghee/milk.
As such most traditional vegetarians are actually in a bad shape.
BTW did you read the latest post on http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/primal-po...
I had earlier posted on the ease with which Grok might have added Tubers to his diet. This post proves that Grok must have been eating a lot of it. So Potatoes should not be bad at all in a paleo diet. Paleo diet should not be low carb at all.
I do think that people with lots of insulin resistant tissues should anyway avoid carbs.
This also matches very well with my belief that protein consumption should be low. I think 1.5gm/kg should be the upper limit for atheletes. This can be shown from two different points.
1) HGs do not eat a large amount of protein. Only Inuits have 25% protein that too because they don't get enough fatty sea mammals. If they could they would have more fat.
2) The protein debate at http://exrx.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4007
I find the position of Dr Stuart more convincing who says that protein requirement is not that much. 1.4gm/kg/day (of lean body weight) is the point of maximum muscle synthesis. This means that for people not really building muscle, but exercising will actually need much less. Dr. Stuart has shown elsewhere that .56gm/Kg/day is enough for atheletes for maintenance.
If protein requirement for men is that low, then rest of the fuel must come from fat or carbs. Getting fatty meat would not be easy in paleolithic era, except when people managed to catch a really big animal. That is why they probably go for the big animals. The rest of the fuel must come from tubers.
Nowadays we can go low carb with high fat, and not need tubers. But at that time it was not a possibility. I think people can add calories through tubers if they have met their basic nutritional requirements through meat. This would be cheaper and not in anyway worse on the health.
Sorry for a long and mostly off-topic post.
This subject is double-plus interesting to me, as I just got out of the hospital Friday evening after being in for a week (I was on IV antibiotics for a severe case of pyelonephritis, including an abscess). I was actually septic by the time I was brought to the ER. My sig. other kept trying to get me to the county clinic, but ended up calling 911 to have me hauled in.
They kept me on a “clear liquid diet” for two days after admission, even though I hadn't eaten anything for two days prior to admission. Then they put me on an “ADA” diet. The things which they will give to diabetics to eat are truly strange.
On the “clear liquid diet,” they gave me boullion cube “soup,” plus Jell-O, plus some sort of lemonade drink with HFCS, etc.
When they started me on the “ADA” (also “renal”) diet, they gave me three (count 'em, three) Italian meatballs of sausage, a pile o'pasta, some broccoli, later on some rice, and some bread. Of course, there was no butter on anything to speak of (but there was margarine, which I refused to touch), no salt (well, I was certainly bloating up nicely from the IV normal saline and IV antibiotics).
The nutritionist actually came to see me, puzzled as to why I was leaving most of the stuff on the plate. I asked her if she thought this stuff was appropriate for a diabetic. Amazingly, she said it was. I asked her to give me meat and vegetables, plus some butter. I never got any butter.
Hell, since I've been home, I've been eating mostly fast-food, as I didn't feel like cooking even though I finally had an appetite again… and as far as I'm concerned, the fast-food is a step up from what they gave me in the hospital.
Great article! Whenever I tell someone that saturated fat is healthy, I almost always get a strange look. In response, I ask “how can something that we evolved on for millions of years all of a sudden be so disastrous to our health”? It's nice to see others sharing the same perspective.
Dr. Ravnskov's book, The Cholesterol Myths, is an excellent resource! I didn't know he had a new book out. I'm going to head over to Amazon right after this and order it! Perhaps the new book explains why the price of The Cholesterol Myths has skyrocketed over the past year.
Peter at Hyperlipid took that apart in two posts:
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/08/...
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/08/...
I think Anand is right about Indians being decent vegetarians. Ghee used to be a staple for vegetarians forever. I was raised in a non-vegetarian family in India but the amount of meat/fish/fowl was limited to maybe three times a week — and our family was considered high on meat consumption.
There are a couple of castes( Brahmin(priests) and Vaishya/Baniya(Traders) who are strictly vegetarian. But I do know from experience and eating in their homes, Brahmins used to eat a LOT of ghee with their legumes. They were healthy, strong and most of the women beautiful( a lot of it has to do with genetics too). Recently, I was reading a work of fiction written in the 30s and the protagonist, a Brahmin, having turned poor due to circumstances, notes the lack of Ghee in his meal and is saddened. This changed in the past twenty years or so. Vegetable oils — with huge marketing promoted as cholesterol free and good for the heart — took over and ghee is considered to be bad and seriously banished from most kitchens. The obesity/heart disease/diabetes seems to be on the rise( some parts like the Tamilnadu in the south, apparently has over 40% diabetic people) and most of it is blamed on the increasing western diet, office jobs, etc. But I do think Indians, especially vegetarians, eat very little saturated fat which might be contributing to the diabetes epidemic. Today, you cannot pay middle class people in India to eat ghee. I wish somebody actually brought this to light.
I actually tell them, that I believe my body knows what is good for it, and it produces saturated fat when there is too much sugar. If it was bad why would it do so. If they show disbelief, I will tell them go ask the doctor. The triglycerides when produced from glucose are mostly saturated. I guess the stupid idea can be blamed on corporations trying to sell their synthetic fats compared to butter.
Twitted by TimBonds // Sep 6, 2009 at 07:39
[...] This post was Twitted by TimBonds [...]
You raise a number of great points, but then you devolve into denigrating a certain group. That really undermines your argument. Tell me, is it logical to think that a vegetarian cannot eat saturated fat? Let's see, butter, milk, cheese, eggs, coconut oil… there are many sources of saturated fat that can be eaten by vegetarians.
You seem to be too easily influenced by others' thoughts, despite your admonitions to “think for yourself.” In spite of the misleading book title, a myth is defined by Webster's as “a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence.” So the fact that vegetarians exist (I have seen them!) kind of proves that it's not a myth. I guess a “menace” is more open to subjectivity, so I won't argue with you if you find vegetarianism menacing. Better keep lifting and eating meat until you can handle that threat without resorting to grade-school tactics.
Some people would love to try to combine “primal” eating and vegetarianism. It would be nice if the efforts made at ostracizing others with different beliefs were equaled by the efforts to find common ground.
Tell you what, Hortense: you go righty ahead and knock yourself out reaching out to vegetarians, vegans…whomever…with your evolved sense of inclusiveness, and I'll just continue to contend that you can't fit a square peg into a round hole — in my own “devolve[d]” and “easily influenced” style.
I doubt anyone's going to try to stop you.
M'kay? Alrighty, then.
Oh, and by the way, the title of Lierre Keith's book refers to the myth that vegetarianism and veganism are more moral, more politically enlightened and environmentally friendly, and more healthy than a proper omnivorous existence — as anyone who actually read the book out to easily figure out.
2 for 2 with the grade school responses. “M'kay? Alrightly then?” I don't understand why your response to me reeks of feeling threatened. Come on, you're obviously successful with what you're doing, there's no need to be menaced by vegetarian weaklings. Try having an actual dialogue. I happen to enjoy 95% of your blog. I just think you run into some kind of mental wall when it comes to discussing vegetarianism.
If you want to discuss semantics, I was responding to *your* usage of the term “myth,” not Keith's.
Can you give me a straight answer to one question? You say above that “you can't fit a square peg into a round hole,” which appears to be a response to my comment about saturated fat. I stated that “butter, milk, cheese, eggs, coconut oil… there are many sources of saturated fat that can be eaten by vegetarians.” If a vegetarian eats these things, how is that equivalent to “fitting a square peg into a round hole?”
I pointed out that vegetarians CAN eat lots of saturated fat, despite your original post suggesting otherwise. To me, it seems like you are trying to *deny* that a round peg can fit in a round hole by saying vegetarianism and saturated fat consumption are incompatible.
Hortense:
It's very simple: vegetarianism and veganism violate a natural diet _on principle_ (not “in,” _on_, and that's an important distinction). There's no reconciliation.
Now, everyone is free to get as close as they would like, but it ain't ever going to be “paleo” or “primal” in any sense whatsoever when it excludes the very most important food group of the Paleolithic: meat & fish.
We can wiggle around the fact all we want, but that's it. As such, I'm not interested.
What I am interested in doing, however, is to pretty much continue in my own style on the matter, mostly for fun, as opportunities arise
Yep, imagine that: for fun, even “gradeschool” fun.
And look: I've never claimed that my diatribes are the best arguments out there. I have, however, always told you all one thing: you always get the real me, not an act of a popularity contest.
And I am glad you like 95% of it. Come to think of it, that's more of it than _I_ like.
Thanks, but do you realize that you changed the argument away from saturated fats (the topic of this post and the topic of my response) to a “primal” diet? I wouldn't have argued with you if the topic of your article was about a “pure” primal diet. I was critical of the fact that you took pot shots at vegetarians over a non-issue. Of course vegetarians can eat saturated fats. I probably eat 2x the saturated fat of most people eating the SAD. I liked your post until it devolved into a seemingly unwarranted attack. Nowhere did I say vegetarianism = primal. I said saturated fats and vegetarianism are perfectly compatible. I can repeat it again if you need me to.
You wrote:
“Some people would love to try to combine “primal” eating and vegetarianism.”
That's what I was specifically replying to, nothing more. I don't dispute that you can have a high-fat veg diet. But it's likely to be pretty high carb too, since your protein sources contain lots of carbs.
Probiotics | Free The Animal // Oct 4, 2009 at 13:59
[...] unsweetened, of course (they have: 0%, 2%, 5%, and Total; 35% fat, 90% of that being blessed hearthealthysaturatedfat). Realize: whenever you use dairy and go for the crappy, shitty, awful, reduced fat garbage — for [...]
Who was it that first established that eating saturated fat was
unhealthy?
What was their methodology?