The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  Lies from Down Under

  A crucial study that seemed to support that view was conducted in Australia on men between the ages of thirty and fifty-nine who had already had a heart attack or had been diagnosed with heart disease. Decades ago, when the study was conducted, its outcome was falsely construed to support the idea that increasing your intake of polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids and lowering dietary saturated fat would improve heart health.

  But guess what? The conclusion in support of eating polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids was contradicted by underlying data allegedly supporting the reported conclusion. It proved to be as bogus as the claim by the Obama administration that the US economy has recovered. Equally, when a team of researchers reopened and reanalyzed the data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study, they found that it was categorically untrue that subjects who consumed more omega-6 fatty acids and less saturated fat were healthier. To the contrary, those in the polyunsaturated fat group had significantly higher rates of death than those consuming traditional, saturated fat.1

  It wasn’t even close—the omega-6 group experienced a 50 percent higher death rate from all causes. (OK, let me not exaggerate: the overall death rate was 49.15 percent higher.) The polyunsaturated fat group experienced a 56.4 percent higher death rate from cardiovascular disease, and they died at a 61.4 percent higher rate from coronary heart disease. In short, the conventionally accepted conclusion that more polyunsaturated vegetable oils were a healthier alternative to eating saturated animal or vegetable fat was remote from the facts.

  Setting aside these spectacularly faulty conclusions drawn from the initial Sydney Diet Heart Study, there is other solid evidence that people in cultures with the highest percentage of saturated fats in their diet have the lowest risk of heart disease. Consider the Inuit Eskimos who live in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Their diets, comprised mostly of whale meat and blubber, derive approximately 75 percent of calories from saturated fat. They are almost entirely free of heart disease and cancer.

  Equally, the Maasai tribe in Kenya thrive on a diet of meat, the blood of cattle, and a fatty milk comparable to half and half. It may not sound very appetizing, but the Maasai have no heart disease.

  You don’t need to travel to the ends of the earth to find remote groups with traditional diets who thrive on high saturated fats. The French have the highest fat consumption in Europe but the lowest rate of death from heart disease, according to European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics.2 In other words, the “French paradox” may have less to do with drinking red wine than with eating lots of butter, Béarnaise sauce, triple cream brie, and Époisses de Bourgogne.

  They Really Don’t Want to Know

  In 1948, the US government funded a longitudinal lifestyle study of 5,209 healthy men and women aged from thirty to sixty-two in Framingham, Massachusetts, to see who developed coronary heart disease. Along the way, more than one thousand medical papers have been published detailing findings from the Framingham study.

  For example, by the 1960s, it had become evident that smoking cigarettes increases the risk of heart disease. Researchers also determined that exercise decreases risk and obesity elevates it. The study also seemed to support the demonization of cholesterol, with the proviso that high levels of HDL (“good”) cholesterol reduce risk of heart disease. But look more closely and you see that the Framingham study actually undercuts rather than confirms the Big Fat Lie.

  In an analysis that many found puzzling, Dr. William Castelli, the third director of the Framingham study, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1992 that those eating the most saturated fat were the healthiest.3 Castelli wrote, “In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people’s serum cholesterol. The opposite of what . . . Keys et al would predict . . . We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories weighed the least and were the most physically active.”

  Castelli’s remarks are sensational. They point to the truths about the Big Fat Lie. It turns out that the cliché about “artery-clogging saturated fats” repeated 428,000 times in my Google search may not be the word of God after all. Dr. Castelli’s revelations point in precisely the opposite direction. Little wonder that they have been played down by those with a stake in maintaining the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Notwithstanding a remarkably muted response by the establishment, Dr. Castelli’s observations have not been entirely overlooked by ordinary persons interested in their health. They even merit a discussion page on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.4

  Dr. Castelli’s remarks are more interesting when you carefully analyze their context. On the face of it, when a leading cardiologist like Dr. Castelli acknowledges that people eating the most saturated fat in the long-running Framingham heart study had lower serum cholesterol and weighed the least, he is effectively repudiating the Big Fat Lie.

  It is as if Benjamin Bernanke were to write an article stating that QE is actually a deflationary policy that contracts the economy and promotes unemployment—all of which may be true. But it is practically impossible for top establishment figures to consciously admit that the whole premises to which they have devoted their lives are wrong.

  Cognitive Dissonance

  In the case of the Big Fat Lie, Dr. Castelli seems to have shied away from the obvious conclusion: the modern American diet is rationalized upon a faulty hypothesis about saturated fat. As I parse his comments, my impression is that he still doesn’t get it—he is perplexed because the data doesn’t fit with mainstream medicine’s conviction that saturated fat should be bad for you, and it doesn’t confirm the Big Fat Lie.

  What is more amazing, given the totally bent information channels that inundate you with propaganda demonizing cholesterol, are the results of peer-reviewed research showing that high cholesterol is good for your health. Yes, you read that properly. High cholesterol has been wrongly demonized.

  A 1994 study from Yale University by Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz et al., titled “Lack of Association Between Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Morbidity and All-Cause Mortality in Persons Older than 70 Years,” showed that people with low cholesterol had nearly twice as many heart attacks as those with high cholesterol.5 But that’s not all.

  A separate ten-year study, reported in the Lancet, showed that people with higher cholesterol had a lower risk of death from all causes.6 Of course, I doubt that high cholesterol protects against traffic accidents or stray bullets, but the inverse correlation with natural causes of death is contrary to what you have been told.

  Even more compelling, in a study of 17,791 heart disease patients, researchers reporting in the American Heart Journal found that lower serum cholesterol actually is predictive of increased mortality. Patients with the supposedly healthy cholesterol readings of 150 mg/dl were at a 48 percent greater risk of death than patients with allegedly “dangerous” cholesterol levels of 250 mg/dl. Indeed, each 10-mg/dL increase in TC level was associated with a 4 percent decreased risk of in-hospital mortality.7 Surprised? Don’t be. The system is designed to fleece you, not to keep you healthy. One in four Americans over the age of forty-five takes cholesterol-lowering drugs, as did 46 percent of the patients in the American Heart Journal study. The fact that these much-prescribed drugs take a heavy toll on health could be considered an innocent coincidence or a cruel hoax. Take your pick.

  The fact that you are left to decipher this doesn’t perplex me at all. It is only perplexing to someone who is invested in validating a dietary and health theory that gained credence in the twentieth century because of the big government corporatocracy. Big government is manipulating an antimarket to reward powerful interests like food companies and pharmaceutical companies, among whose biggest products are statin drugs.

  Let’s Pretend

  Think about it. Everyone who matters wants to keep up the appearance that the Big Fat Lie is true. The food industry doe
s, for obvious reasons. Their margins from selling processed, fake foods that are cheaper to produce, totally scalable, and don’t require refrigeration are incomparably higher than what they could earn selling real foods with natural, saturated fats subject to rapid spoilage.

  Although it may seem strange, even the dairy industry has adapted and found a way to profit from the “fat makes you fat” lie. They became complicit in that hoax through the aggressive marketing of nonfat milk as a supposedly healthier alternative to whole milk. What rubbish. The obvious corollary to this is that dairies get to sell the milk fat separately. As I write, the most recent closing price for a pound of butter fat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was $1.7025. The price differential, if any, between fat-free milk and whole milk is always skinnier than the approximately $.50 a gallon the dairies gain by selling the butterfat separately from the milk. Fat-free milk is marketed not to make you healthier but to profit from your gullibility.

  But if you ever find yourself drinking that stuff, remember the pig farmers are grateful. The ready availability of nonfat milk makes it easier for them to fatten their hogs. Nonfat milk has the same effect on the metabolism of pigs as it has on yours. It makes them fat, which is why it is commonly used by pig farmers to fatten their swine.

  (If you think I’m joking, follow this link that reports on three studies that found drinking skim milk makes children fatter: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/19/174739752/whole-milk-or-skim-study-links-fattier-milk-to-slimmer-kids. It links to an NPR story from March 20, 2013: “Whole Milk or Skim? Study Links Fattier Milk to Slimmer Kids.”)

  As a blog from the Butter Believer succinctly put it, “Were our ancestors eating fat-free sour cream, cholesterol-free ‘buttery spreads’ or skim milk? Of course not. Dairy had always been consumed in its whole, full-fat form before the industrialization of foods began. And no one had heart disease. The field of medical cardiology didn’t even exist until the advent of industrial seed oils packed with toxic polyunsaturated fat.”8

  The fact that the Big Fat Lie is indeed a lie is perversely one of its charms to the crony capitalist corporatocracy. If the high-carb diet loaded with polyunsaturated omega-6 fats of the dietary guidelines really were conducive to good health, much of the support for such a diet would vanish. It is precisely the fact that the government’s official diet has ruined the health of tens of millions of Americans and brought on an epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease that accounts for the widespread willingness among so many vested interests to go along with the gag.

  They are happy to pretend that it is good for you to eat gobs of polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids laced with artificial trans fats—so long as it really isn’t. If it really were good for you that would mean a startling collapse in demand for a whole range of industries.

  The Big Fat Lie’s Beneficiaries

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, when everyone was eating saturated fats, obesity was exceedingly rare. And so was coronary heart disease. Of course, I would not pretend that the disturbance of metabolism arising from the introduction of fake fats in the American diet was the sole cause of the surge in obesity. It is certainly true that the proliferation of laborsaving devices and the movement away from physical work have reduced the caloric burden of everyday living. That said, many of these developments took effect in the second half of the nineteenth century without precipitating a surge of obesity.

  It is also pertinent that a recent study of calorie expenditure by a surviving hunter-gatherer population, the Hanza, of Northern Tanzania, showed no significant difference in total energy expenditure between the Hanza who procure their own food and sedentary modern office workers. So contrary to what you might expect, the labor-saving devices that we employ but the Hanza don’t apparently can’t be blamed for the fact that so many of us are obese.9

  Energy requirements may wax and wane, but the fact that so many persons have found it difficult or impossible to adjust their diets accordingly, through the natural regulatory mechanisms of appetite, suggests to me that those mechanisms had been deranged, most probably by the introduction of fake foods, particularly fake fats.

  Before fake fats destroyed the balance between nutrition and energy exertion, heart disease was too rare to even require a medical specialty. The first coronary catheterization was not even performed until 1929. The lucrative field of interventional cardiology has emerged since then, greatly expanding since the late 1970s when Big Brother’s Big Fat Lie was officially incorporated in the US government’s dietary guidelines.

  There were only 500 practicing cardiologists in the United States in 1950. That number has ballooned almost fiftyfold since then, while the population has only a bit more than doubled. In 2014, 1,954,000 cardiac operations were performed, making work for lots of surgeons and helping amortize expensive surgical theaters and operating rooms in hospitals throughout the United States.10

  Seen from the perspective of the self-interest of vested groups, a lot of the US economy is predicated upon your continued embrace of the Big Fat Lie. Not only does the food industry profit, but the prosperity of cardiologists and weight-loss clinics is directly linked to the willingness of the American people to swallow the lies they’ve been told—and the food that goes with it.

  America’s Fat Epidemic

  When the twentieth century began, only 1 in 150 Americans was obese. By 1950, as the first generation exposed to trans fats in Crisco reached middle age, the number of obese soared to 10 percent of the population. By the mid-’70s, 15 percent of Americans were obese. Data from 2012 shows that two-thirds of Americans were overweight, of whom 35.7 percent were obese with grim consequences for health.11

  The pervasive consumption of trans fats represents a major departure from past practices when obesity was rare. Animal studies suggest that contrary to what you have been told, obesity is not merely a function of calories ingested, but weight gain varies dramatically with the composition of calories in the diet. The junk food industry would have you swallow another dietary myth: the simpleminded conviction that weight gain is merely a matter of burning fewer calories than you ingest. They would have you believe that all calories count equally as contributions to obesity.

  Wrong.

  Accelerated weight gain is a direct consequence of eating artificial, partially hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils. In a long-term study lasting six years, scientists fed one group of monkeys a diet containing trans fats, while another luckier group of monkeys got a diet without them.12 Both diets were identical in total fat content and the number of calories. But the weight gain was not identical. The trans-fat monkeys gained 400 percent more weight than the trans-fat-free monkeys, although both consumed the same number of calories.

  It isn’t just the food industry and cardiologists that make a living off of the big fat lie; oncologists have gotten their share of new business as well. A seven-year study conducted in France, as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, tracked twenty thousand women with complete diet histories and blood samples. This showed that trans fat consumption was associated with a 75 percent increase in invasive breast cancer. And the overall incidence of cancer has soared as the percentage of calories in the diet from saturated fats has declined. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one-third of all cancers are directly related to obesity.

  Consider the weight loss and diet industry, whose market depends almost entirely on the big fat lie. The research firm Marketdata estimates that the total US weight loss market enjoyed revenues of $60.9 billion in 2010. What would that market have been worth if Americans were still eating the traditional diet high in saturated fat our ancestors consumed a century ago, when only 1 person out of 150 was obese?

  Big Pharma Cashes In

  And of course, the pharmaceutical industry now has at least 29 billion reasons to lie about cholesterol. That is the amount of money they pocket annually by selling statin drugs designed to
reduce serum cholesterol. And the FDA that pretends to be looking out for you is doing its best to make sure you are taking expensive statins (expensive in more sense than one). Doctors are now being told to no longer adhere to rigid clinical guidelines that trigger the use of a statin when cholesterol levels reach a certain threshold. Even if your cholesterol is not “too high” according to the former metrics, your doctor will be encouraged by the government’s official pill-pimper to put you on a regime of statins. As Chris Kesser of Let’s Take Back Your Health lucidly explained, 92 percent of people taking statins are healthy.13 The FDA has approved the prescription of these drugs to people at low risk for heart disease and stroke and who don’t even have high cholesterol.

  Of course, it is only a happy coincidence from the perspective of the drug companies that their lucrative sales of statin drugs have, among other side effects, the likelihood of increasing lucrative sales of diabetes drugs. As reported by Alice Park in a March 2013 Time article, “Statins May Seriously Increase Diabetes Risk,” a study published in Diabetologia reported a finding by Finnish scientists that men prescribed statins had a 46 percent greater chance of developing diabetes after six years compared to those had not been prescribed the drug.14 Furthermore, the risk of diabetes increased with the higher the dose of the statin and the longer the patients took them.

  Doesn’t sound good for the patients, but as they say, it is a foul wind that blows no one any good. Big Pharma’s most lucrative class of drugs is diabetes medicine. The market for such drugs is currently about $30 billion annually and rising rapidly as another American is diagnosed with diabetes every twenty-three seconds.15