We are told by medical professionals to eat a diet high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat. Yet when we do so, many of us find that we still can’t lose weight and have no energy.
When we look back to the health and diet of people before 1900, we find that people who ate their traditional diets, high in saturated fats, were much healthier. It was even a well know fact in most cultures that when a person was ill, they would be given a higher saturated fat diet to help cure them.
For centuries, healthy people all over the globe had one thing in common in their varied diets-- high saturated fat content. The traditional fats that people have thrived on for thousands of years include butter, lard, tallow, olive oil, palm oil, and coconut oil.
But after thousands of years of health and eating saturated fats, suddenly our attitude about them changed in the mid 1900’s. What happened?
Prior to WWII, when people were ill, they were told by doctors to eat a high fat diet. Cookbooks in the 1800’s and early 1900’s were filled with recipes high in butterfat, lard and other fats. Coconut oil was common and used to make a healthier margarine (oleo). Yet, despite all this saturated fat, heart disease was practically unknown.
That all changed when some faulty studies were done in the Mediterranean region of Europe in the 1930’s. The diet they observed was the result of poverty after the war. It was not really the traditional healthy diet of the Mediterranean peoples. What was observed was people eating a low fat, high carbohydrate diet.
When researchers went back, years later, to the same Mediterranean regions studied in the 1930’s, they found the people eating a diet high in saturated fat, with cheese, butter and fatty meats, like sausages. By this time the people of the area had recovered economically from the war, they were reverting to their traditional diet, high in saturated fats. But the researchers reported that those people had abandoned their “traditional low-fat diet”.
Other studies done in the 1940’s-1960’s combined saturated fats and hydrogenated fats together, which changed the results. Or when the results of the study came out in favor of how healthy saturated fat was, the researcher would say it was unusual and he still believed that saturated fat was bad. Because of these studies, and some widely publicized low-fat diets, like the Pritikin Diet, saturated fat was condemned as the reason that Americans were becoming unhealthier.
Also, during World War II, when the Japanese controlled most of the pacific, Americans began producing more and more vegetable oils since coconut oil had become scarce. This vegetable oil production became a huge industry.
Between this and the increasing unpopularity of saturated fats, we began the switch to vegetable oils. The corn oil and soybean oil industries pushed this switch by making coconut oil sound like an unhealthy saturated fat, and they profited immensely from it.
And the number of people who died from heart attacks rose from 10% in the 20’s to 30% in the 50’s, and it has continued to climb to over 40% today. It is the leading cause of death in the United States. As the rate of heart disease has climbed, our intake of saturated fats has dropped sharply. If saturated fats were the problem, there should be less heart disease as less saturated fat is eaten. Interestingly enough, our consumption of processed vegetable oils and other artificial and processed foods containing trans-fats has increased dramatically.
Based on popular thinking, despite studies that showed otherwise, the food pyramid was made to reflect what was considered to be a healthier low-fat diet, and generations of Americans and people across the globe were taught that a low fat diet was the healthiest diet.
|