History of The Cholesterol Hoax

August 4, 2008

Mary here is the info you requested:

Author: Ian McAllister

The saturated fat and low cholesterol fraud earns the hoaxers billions of dollars each year and kills millions in America alone each year.

Lie 1. Saturated fat is bad for you so you must use unsaturated vegetable oils Lie 2. Cholesterol is bad for you so you need a low cholesterol diet Lie 3. Unsaturated vegetable oils are good for you

As I mentioned in my weight loss diet home page, the first recorded heart attack was in Britain in 1878. In the early 1900s Dr Dudley White (referred to as the founder of cardiology) said that he wanted to find out more about the new disease reported in European medical literature, but he had to wait until 1921 before he met his first heart attack patient.

During last century consumption of vegetable oils rose continuously, and so did the incidence of heart attacks. Now that we have got the facts out of the way, let's go back to the story of the lies.

Start of the scam

After the first world war the vegetable oil manufacturers were in trouble. Their main market was for manufacture of paints and varnishes and putty, because these all harden when exposed to Oxygen. That meant that they couldn't use them for food because they would form plaque in the blood vessels and cause heart attacks.

It would have cost the manufacturers a lot of money to buy pigs to try out the diet (the pig is the closest animal to humans as far as nutrition is concerned) but their salesmen persuaded pig farmers to buy the oils to feed to pigs. The farmers were delighted when the pigs put on weight explosively on the oil diet. That meant that they could cut down on feed costs because the pigs were slaughtered sooner. The salesmen weren't quite as pleased, because it would need fast talking to sell fattening oils to humans.

Then the farmers ran into trouble. The pigs getting a diet of unsaturated vegetable oils died of cancer or heart attacks before they could be slaughtered, even with their early obesity.

Fortunately for the manufacturers humans don't keep records of what they eat, so they can't usually associate what they have eaten with their health. So the salesmen set out to persuade humans that a diet rich in unsaturated vegetable oils was healthy.

They met high sales resistance because everyone was fond of butter, but the butter manufacturers started to centrifuge out the butter instead of churning it, resulting in a tasteless mess. So the margarine manufacturers were able to claim that "you can't tell margerine from butter" once butter had no taste.

People still took pride in using butter, so the manufacturers bribed a medical research worker to invent the cholesterol lie. Cholesterol is used widely by the body, especially by the brain. If the liver stopped making cholesterol we would rapidly become stupid. When you cut down on cholesterol in your diet your liver has to manufacture a little more, but that is easy because your liver makes a lot more cholesterol than you could possibly eat.

A couple of decades ago the man who invented the cholesterol lie admitted that he had been bribed to do so by the makers of margarine to discourage the use of butter in the diet and present margarine as a hearth healthy diet item, even though it is full of deadly trans fatty acids. It worked...

I expected the cholesterol myth to vanish overnight, but the story was suppressed by the media, and we still hear over and over again the lies about low cholesterol diets. Research workers have been trying for half a century to prove that cholesterol is bad for you but have failed, because it has to be made by your body for you to remain healthy. Your brain is half cholesterol, so if you interfere with your liver production of cholesterol you become more stupid.

Suppression of evidence

C.T. McGee tells an amusing story in his book published in 1993 "Heart Frauds: The Misapplication of High Technology in Heart Disease" Cour D'Alene, ID MediPress, p155-156. An old baboon was so much trouble that they decided to get rid of him by giving him a heart attack. They gave him only eggs to eat for a year. He still hadn't died so they killed him and examined him for cholesterol deposits in his blood vessels. There were none, so the information was suppressed.

This is typical of modern healthy diet research. If results are unfavorable to a pet theory they may appear in some obscure journal that nobody reads, but if the media take up the story they will be threatened with loss of advertising revenue.

The advantage of this lie is that if your cholesterol doesn't come down they can say that you aren't trying hard enough with your low cholesterol diet and sell you drugs to lower your cholesterol by interfering with the action of your liver. The media trumpet the results of tests showing that the drug lowered heart attacks by 0.1% but they keep quiet about cancer deaths increasing by 5% in the same experiment.

We are told that the plaque in our blood vessels is cholesterol. Well some of it is. Most of it is made from unsaturated vegetable oils in our diet, not the result of high cholesterol diets. Plaque is formed like a scab on a cut finger, to cure a breach in the skin. Unfortunately that can clog a blood vessel completely. The answer is to prevent the blood vessels being damaged in the first instance and to make sure that your diet has all the vitamins and minerals that you need to keep your blood vessels healthy and the cholesterol liquid enough to be carried round to your brain.

We are told that Eskimos don't get heart attacks, because their diet prevents blood clotting. That is true...they die of internal bleeding instead, referred to as "strokes".

Cellular damage of low cholesterol vegetable oil diet

Unsaturated oils are drying oils. That means that they harden when exposed to oxygen, whether it is in putty, or varnish, or your blood stream.

Our ancestors lived on a diet high in saturated fats. Dr Yamori reported that rats given high cholesterol and saturated fat diets had fewer strokes. Saturated fats don't produce free radicals, so antioxidants were not as necessary to our ancestors as they are in today's diets.

Most people know now that margarine is dangerous because of the trans fatty acids, but they don't realize that when they heat up any unsaturated oil they are also creating toxic products that don't happen when you use lard or butter for cooking.

The membranes round the cells in our body are mostly fat. Saturated fats are C shaped and interlock to produce a strong membrane. Unsaturated oils are straight so don't lock together, so weaker membranes are produced, more open to infection.

What is the solution

Refuse to accept the lies about saturated fats in your diet and cholesterol in your diet and polyunsaturated vegetable oils for cooking. Go back to using saturated fats in your diet. It is more healthy for your heart.

There is something even better. It is a saturated fat, but a short-chain saturated fat, not long-chain like the animal fats. The short-chain fat is used by your body in a completely different manner. You still need animal fats for all the old uses like building cell membranes, carrying fat-soluble vitamins, and building your brain, but the short-chain fats are used instead as a source of energy.

Better still, ordinary fats are used as fuel when the short-chain fats are burned for energy, so you have a healthy diet that will let you lose weight, and keep your brain and your immune system, and your heart healthy.

Coconut oil is the best short-chain oil but palm oil is also very good. I use about 100mls (7 tablespoons) of coconut oil each day, and the Filipinos have coconuts as more than 60% of their diet, but if you prefer to limit yourself to three tablespoons each day that is fine. If the only change that you make in your diet is to get rid of vegetable oils and use coconut oil instead you will lose weight.

As usual the less foods are processed, the better they are for you, so if you can get good fresh coconuts they are much better than oil. However the nuts I buy in my supermarket are mostly moldy and I have to throw them out.

The saturated fat and low cholesterol fraud is probably more deadly than all the others, because heart attacks, cancer, and strokes are the greatest killers after medical errors.

But conventional medicine pulls out all the stop with the next lie, making you feel guilty for the death of a loved one.

References

There is too much evidence about for me to give you more than a sample.

Prior IA et al 1981 Cholesterol, coconuts, and diet on Polynesian atolls: a natural experiment: the Pukapuka and Tokelau island studies. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. (34(8):1552

Carroll, K.K. and Khor, HT 1971: Effects of level and type of dietary fat on incidence of mammary tumors induced in female Sprague-dawley rats by 7,12-dimethylbenzanthracene. Lipids 6:415

Whealan, J. 1997. Polyunsaturated fatty acids: Signalling agents for intestinal cancer. Nutr. Today 32(5):213

Madhavi, N. et al. 1994. Suppression of human T-cell growth in vitro by cis-unsaturated fatty acids: relationship to free radicals and lipid peroxidation. Prostagland Leukotri, Es. Fatty Acids 51:33

Hausman, P. 1981. Jack Sprat's Legacy - The science and politics of fat and cholesterol. New York: Richard Mauk Publishers. Pg 53-61

Geliebter, A. 1980. Overfeeding with a diet containing medium chain triglyceride impedes accumulation of body fat. Clinical Research.

[Translating that last one into English it means that it doesn't matter how much you overeat on medium-chain fats (coconut and palm oil) you don't put on any weight.]

Boushey, C.J., et al. 1995. A quantitative assessment of plasma homocystine as a risk factor for vascular disease. JAMA 274:1049

[The above is about the dangers of homocystine which appears when you cook with unsaturated vegetable oils, but not with saturated fats such as coconut oil or lard]

The Cholesterol Hoax. Sheldon Zerden. 1997: Bridger House Publications Inc.

http://healthforu.info/health/diethealth/Saturated-Fat-Food-Lies.html