The Redemption of Cholesterol—How It Supports Your Health

 

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By Dr. Mercola

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death, and cholesterol is frequently given the blame. But is it justified?

Over the past 60 years, research has repeatedly demonstrated that there's NO correlation between high cholesterol and plaque formation that leads to heart disease. Despite that, the saturated fat/cholesterol myth has persisted.

After researching the science of lipids, cholesterol, heart disease, and nutrition for nearly eight decades, Dr. Fred Kummerow—now nearly 100 years old—has a thing or two to say about the matter. In fact, he was the first researcher to identifywhich fat really causes the clogged arteries conventionally blamed on saturated fats.

Since the late '70s, he's also studied the imbalance of nutrients in the American diet that lead to obesity. His new book, Cholesterol Is Not the Culprit, focuses on the basic chemistry of food, how your body works, and how food fits into the equation.

Dr. Kummerow's work shows that it's not cholesterol that causes heart disease—it's quite safe to eat eggs, for example—rather it's the trans fats that are to blame. He was one of the first to make this association, and the first to publish a scientific article on it, all the way back in 1957.

"That was the first article that showed that trans fatty acids, which are present in hydrogenated fats, caused heart disease," he says.

Why FDA Finally Took a Stand Against Trans Fats

Consumption of trans fat, which for decades was touted as a healthier alternative to saturated animal fat, radically increased in the mid-1950s. 

And according to Dr. Kummerow, rates of sudden death from heart disease have faithfully risen right along with trans fat consumption. Fortunately, the science showing trans fats to be FAR more harmful than saturated fat is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves.

Not surprisingly, considering his long history in this field, Dr. Kummerow may have played an instrumental role in getting the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to finally address this health hazard. In 2009, Dr. Kummerow filed a citizen petition with the FDA calling for a ban on synthetic trans fats. In the petition, he noted that:

"Trans fat leads to the reduction of prostacyclin that is needed to prevent blood clots in the arteries. A blood clot in any of the coronary arteries can result in sudden death.”

The FDA is required to respond to such petitions within 180 days, but nearly four years later, it still had not responded. So, last year he filed a lawsuit against the agency.1 Interestingly enough, it wasn't long thereafter that the FDA announced it was considering removing partially hydrogenated oils—the primary source of trans fats—from the list of "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) ingredients.

The agency gave the industry a total of 120 days to comment on the proposal. The FDA noted that there are 30,000 items in the American diet that contain trans fats. That should give you an indication of just how prevalent these dangerous fats are!

Basically, if you eat processed foods, you're likely eating trans fats. Many products that claim to be "zero trans fat" simply have portion sizes that are so ridiculously small that the trans fat falls below the permissible limits.

Trans Fats 101

Structurally, trans fats are synthetic fatty acids. Fourteen of them are produced during the hydrogenation process. (They are not present in either animal or vegetable fats.) As explained by Dr. Kummerow, trans fats prevent the synthesis of prostacyclin,2 which is necessary to keep your blood flowing.

When your arteries cannot produce prostacyclin, blood clots form, and you may succumb to sudden death. Avoiding trans fat is therefore imperative for cardiovascular health. Vaccenic acid, found in cow’s milk, while a naturally-occurring trans fat, has an entirely different composition and does not cause the adverse health effects associated with hydrogenated oils.

"It's a matter of complex chemistry that makes a difference," Dr. Kummerow says. "The Food and Drug Administration has for years confused those two fatty acids. One causes no problem; the other one does."

Trans Fat and Oxidized Cholesterol Are Responsible for Heart Disease

Dr. Kummerow recently published a paper3 showing that there are two lipids (fats) in our diet responsible for the formation of heart disease. The first is trans fat found in partially hydrogenated oil.

The other one is oxidized cholesterol, formed when cholesterol  is heated. The primary source of the latter is fried foods. Powdered egg yolk is another example of a food where heating has damaged the fat to the point of creating harmful oxidized cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol (again, not dietary cholesterol in and of itself) causes increased thromboxane formation—a factor that clots your blood.

"You have prostacyclin that keeps your blood flowing, and thromboxane that clots your blood. You have to be very careful about the ratio, the amount of each in the blood. That's the simple explanation [for what causes heart disease],"Dr. Kummerow says. "In 2011, 325,000 people died from sudden death... and we're going to keep on seeing people die of sudden death [unless trans fats are removed entirely from the diet].

In 1958, I showed that if I fed a rat trans fat and then took it out of the diet, in a month, the trans fat is... metabolized out. There's no more trans fat in the body. If today the FDA decided that no more trans fat should be in the diet, next month, people who have been eating this fat will have lost the trans fat. It would have been metabolized. There would be – next year and the year after – less death from sudden deaths."

Avoiding Processed Food Is the Easiest Way to Protect Your Heart

The fact that your body can eliminate trans fats in about a month is encouraging. The tragic reality, of course, is that 95 percent of the food that most Americans eat is processed—and processed food is where all this trans fat lies. The key message here is that you don't have to wait for the FDA to make a ruling on trans fat. You can avoid trans fats by eliminating all processed foods, which would also include most restaurant food. If you can eliminate that from your diet, and replace it with fresh, locally grown vegetables, healthy fats, and animal proteins in appropriate amounts, you're far less likely to end up with heart disease.

Balancing your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is also key for heart health, as these fatty acids help build the cells in your arteries that make the prostacyclin that keeps your blood flowing smoothly. Omega-3 deficiency can cause or contribute to very serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. For more information about omega-3s and the best sources of this fat, please review this previous article. Besides animal-based omega-3 fats, other sources of healthful fats to add to your diet include:

Avocados	Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk	Raw dairy	Organic pastured egg yolks
Coconuts and coconut oil	Unheated organic nut oils	Raw nuts, such as almonds, pecans, macadamia, and seeds	Grass-fed meats

How to Avoid Arterial Calcification

You also need the appropriate ratios of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium, and all of these are generally abundant in a whole food diet. The following tidbit will give you an idea of how these nutrients come into play: by analyzing the composition of veins, Dr. Kummerow showed that people undergoing a heart bypass typically have 40 to 60 percent of something called sphingomyelin in their arteries. Sphingomyelin is a part of five phospholipids that surround the arterial cell to protect it. The amount of sphingomyelin changes over time, and is largely dependent on your diet. Oxidized fats promote the creation of sphingomyelin.

"When half the artery was now sphingomyelin, the salt in the blood causes it to have a negative charge; the calcium in the arteries has a positive charge. The calcium then adheres to the wall of the artery and gradually causes the coronary artery to become calcified," he explains.

"It's well-known now that calcification is involved in [heart disease], to the point where the blood can no longer flow through that coronary artery. The heart doesn't get the blood supply it needs, and it begins to ache. Of course, then you go to a physician, and get saved through a coronary bypass operation. There are 300,000 of them now a year in this country. So, it's important to keep your artery free of calcification. You can do that by not eating oxidized fats. That's what causes that.

Of course, the other thing I mentioned is that if you don't eat trans fats, you will not interfere with the flow of your blood. The trans fats will have no influence because if you don't eat them, they're not going to be there. That's the other reason for heart disease. If you don't eat trans fat and the oxidized fat, you won't have heart disease."

Healthy Advice from a Scientist Who's Nearly 100 Years Old

Dr. Kummerow was largely responsible for finding the association of pellagra and niacin deficiency, and the first researcher to identify the fact that trans fat was a major cause of heart disease. As he nears the age of 100, he's still working; still researching, and his brain is as sharp as ever. If nothing else, he's a true testament to what "right living" can do for you!

"I can tell you what I think: you have to have a healthy diet," he says. "You have to exercise every day. I used to go swimming at noon, have my lunch along, and eat it in my laboratory. I always went swimming at least a half hour. I bicycled, too. I bicycled to work from my house, which was a mile away from my lab, every day."

Vitamins K2 and D are also important players. Some researchers, like Dr. Stephanie Seneff, believe optimizing your vitamin D levels through regular sun exposure, opposed to taking an oral supplement, may be key to optimizing your heart health. Recent research published in the journal Menopause4, 5 also appears to offer support for Dr. Seneff's theories on the cholesterol-vitamin D link. 

Dr. Kummerow notes there is research showing that excessive amounts of vitamin D through supplementation actually promotes arterial calcification. But it's important to distinguish between vitamin D created by your body in response to sun exposure, and vitamin D taken in pill form. For example, while it's extremely difficult to reach excessive vitamin D levels (thereby causing arterial calcification) through sun exposure, vitamin K2 is critical for avoiding such results when you take high amounts of supplemental vitamin D.

I personally have not taken oral vitamin D in over four years. I get all of my vitamin D from exposure to the sun. The benefit of doing it this way is that your body has a built-in biofeedback mechanism that regulates the amounts of vitamin D that is made. This ensures you'll have just the right amount your body needs.

Now, when you take oral vitamin D, you increase your need for vitamin K2. The biological role of vitamin K2 is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also helps remove calcium from areas where it shouldn't be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues. Symptoms of vitamin D toxicity are actually produced by vitamin K2 deficiency, including the inappropriate calcification that can lead to hardening of your arteries.

Sugar—Another Primary Driver of Heart Disease

While not discussed in this interview, I want to remind you that sugar is another primary dietary culprit in the development of heart disease. To protect your heart health, you need to address your insulin and leptin resistance, which is the result of eating a diet too high in sugars and grains. To safely and effectively reverse insulin and leptin resistance, thereby lowering your heart disease risk, you need to:

1. Avoid sugar, processed fructose, and grains if you are insulin and leptin resistant. This effectively means you must avoid most processed foods
2. Eat a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replace the grain carbs with:
• Large amounts of vegetables
• Low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals)
• As much high-quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monounsaturated from animal and tropical oil sources). Most people actually need upwards of 50-85 percent fats in their diet for optimal health—a far cry from the 10 percent currently recommended.

More Information

While there are dozens of books on cholesterol out there, Cholesterol Is Not the Culprit was written by the person who first figured out the true foundational causes of heart disease, namely trans fat, and oxidized cholesterol from fried foods (fats damaged by heating). And he did it 57 years ago! If you have any interest in learning more about the ins and outs of cholesterol, I strongly encourage you to get Dr. Kummerow's book. It's available on Amazon, and is a really great read.

Related articles

• The Redemption of Cholesterol - How It Supports Your Health
• FDA Sued, Forced to Remove Safety Status on Trans Fats
• 11 Charts That Show Everything Wrong with Our Modern Diet
• Saturated Fat NOT the Cause of Heart Disease
• Butter Consumption Reaches a 40-Year High
• Our Efforts to Prevent Heart Disease

Our Efforts to Prevent Heart Disease

USDA logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Dr. Mercola

The video above is a special edition of Catalyst,1 aired on ABC News in Australia. In it, Dr. Maryanne Demasi investigates the science behind the persistent claim that saturated fat causes heart disease by raising cholesterol.

I highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch it, as it does an excellent job describing how we got so far down the wrong track.

The idea that high cholesterol causes heart disease can be traced back to Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902), a German pathologist who found thickening in the arteries in people he autopsied, which he ascribed to a collection of cholesterol.

He was followed by Ancel Keys (1904-2004), a well-known physiologist who published his seminal paper known as the “Seven Countries Study”2 in 1963. This first major report linking saturated animal fat consumption to heart disease served as the basis for nearly all of the initial scientific support for the Cholesterol Theory.

What many don’t know is that data was actually available from 22 countries, but Keys selectively analyzed information from only seven of them. The seven countries chosen held true to his initial theory.

Upon later analysis, other researchers discovered that when all 22 countries are included, there’s no correlation at all between saturated fat consumption and coronary heart disease. In fact, the full data set suggests the opposite—that those eating the most saturated animal fat tend to have a lower incidence of heart disease.

The Propagation of Flawed Science

Over the past 60 years, research has repeatedly demonstrated that there’s NO correlation between high cholesterol and plaque formation that leads to heart disease. Despite that, the saturated fat/cholesterol myth has been an extremely persistent one.

As of 2010, recommendations from the US Department of Agriculture3 (USDA) call for reducing your saturated fat intake to a mere 10 percent of your total calories or less. Fat is abhorred to the point it was virtually removed entirely from the latest USDA “food pyramid,” now called “MyPlate”. Except for a small portion of dairy, which is advised to be fat-free or low-fat, fats are missing entirely.

How could this be?

This is the precise converse of what your body needs!  Many health experts now believe that, for optimal health, you likely need anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of your daily calories in the form of healthful fats.

In the 1960s, British physician John Yudkin was among the first to challenge Ancel Keys’ hypothesis, stating that SUGAR is the culprit in heart disease—not saturated fat.

Alas, as described in the featured video, Keys was a politically powerful figure. He publicly discredited and ridiculed Yudkin, whose sugar hypothesis ended up fading into oblivion. By the 1970s, supporting the sugar hypothesis made you a quack in the eyes of the medical establishment.

So rather than following the science, or at least having an open mind to investigate multiple hypotheses, public health recommendations simply followed the trail of the loudest, most politically astute bully...

Just to give you a couple of recent examples, here are two 2010 studies—both of which negate Keys’ selectively biased findings and the cholesterol hypothesis as a whole, while supporting the sugar hypothesis in the development of heart disease:

• A meta-analysis4 that pooled data from 21 studies and included nearly 348,000 adults found no difference in the risks of heart disease and stroke between people with the lowest and highest intakes of saturated fat.
• Another 2010 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition5found that a reduction in saturated fat intake must be evaluated in the context of replacement by other macronutrients, such as carbohydrates.
  When you replace saturated fat with a higher carbohydrate intake, particularly refined carbohydrate, you exacerbate insulin resistance and obesity, increase triglycerides and small LDL particles, and reduce beneficial HDL cholesterol.
  The authors state that dietary efforts to improve your cardiovascular disease risk should primarily emphasize the limitation of refined carbohydrate intake, and weight reduction.

‘Low-Fat’ and Trans Fat—Two ‘Healthier’ Alternatives That Turned Out to Be Disastrous for Public Health

The cholesterol hypothesis turned into a boon for the processed food industry, which began creating all manner of “low-fat” and “low cholesterol” foods. Healthful saturated fats were also swapped for harmful trans fats, and ever increasing amounts of sugar.

Sugar was later replaced by processed high fructose corn syrup, which is far cheaper to produce. Then, in 1995, the first genetically engineered corn was approved in the US, and today, most of the corn syrup used in processed foods is made fromgenetically engineered corn. This has its own set of potential hazards, over and above those associated with fructose.

This chain of events offers even more support for the notion that it is the processed sugar (and grains if you are insulin and leptin resistant) in your diet—not saturated fat—that causes heart disease. Because despite the low-fat craze, rates of heart disease have stayed on a steady incline.

While saturated fat consumption was dramatically reduced in most people’s diet, what didn’t decrease was sugar. On the contrary, fructose consumption has skyrocketed, courtesy of it being added to virtually every imaginable kind of processed food and beverage. (One of the reasons for all this added sugar is because when you remove fat, you remove flavor. Sugar and added flavorings are used to add flavor back in.)

Consumption of trans fat, which for decades was touted as a healthier alternative to saturated animal fat, also radically increased, starting in the mid-1950s. Fortunately, the science showing trans fats to be FAR more harmful than saturated fat is now being officially acknowledged.  

On November 7, 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it is now considering removing partially hydrogenated oils—the primary source of trans fats—from the list of "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) ingredients.6 This is the first step toward getting trans fats out of the American diet altogether. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also called for the elimination of trans fats from the global food supply.7

Your Body Needs Saturated Fat and Cholesterol

Unfortunately, the FDA is still holding fast to its ignorant view on saturated animal fats, urging people to “choose products that have the lowest combined amount of saturated fat, cholesterol and trans fat.”8 The fact of the matter is, saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a number of important health benefits, and your body requires them for the proper function of your:

Cell membranes	Heart	Bones (to assimilate calcium)
Liver	Lungs	Hormones
Immune system	Satiety (reducing hunger)	Genetic regulation

One of the most important fats your body needs for optimal health is animal-based omega-3. Again demonstrating the abject failure of government guidelines to promote health, the 2011 “food pyramid” (My Plate) doesn’t mention omega-3 at all. In an effort to remedy this atrocious situation, I’ve created my own Food Pyramid for Optimal Health, which you can print out and share with your friends and family.

Omega-3 deficiency can cause or contribute to very serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. For more information about omega-3s and the best sources of this fat, please review this previous article. Besides animal-based omega-3 fats, other sources of healthful fats to add to your diet include:

Avocados	Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk	Raw dairy	Organic pastured egg yolks
Coconuts and coconut oil	Unheated organic nut oils	Raw nuts such as, almonds, pecans, macadamia, and seeds	Grass-fed meats

Sugar Is a Primary Driver of Heart Disease

As initially postulated by Dr. Yudkin in the 1960s, SUGAR is a primary dietary culprit in the development of heart disease. To protect your heart health you need to address your insulin and leptin resistance, which is the result of eating a diet too high in sugars and grains—again, not fat (with the exception of trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which have been linked to increased heart disease risk, even in small amounts). To safely and effectively reverse insulin and leptin resistance, thereby lowering your heart disease risk, you need to:

• Avoid sugar, processed fructose, grains if you are insulin and leptin resistant, and processed foods
• Eat a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replace the grain carbs with:
• Large amounts of vegetables
• Low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals)
• As much high quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monosaturated from animal and tropical oil sources). Most people actually need upwards of 50-85 percent fats in their diet for optimal health—a far cry from the 10 percent currently recommended.

Inaccurate Science Still Dictating Medical Treatment...

Besides spawning an entire food revolution of low-fat, low-cholesterol products devoid of healthful fats, the cholesterol theory has also resulted in a massive boon for the drug industry. Cholesterol-lowering statins are now among the most widely prescribed drugs on the market with one in four Americans over 45 taking them. Statins are already the number one profit-maker for the pharmaceutical industry, and they’re about to get yet another major boost in sales, courtesy of updated treatment guidelines laid out in the 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Treatment of Blood Cholesterol to Reduce Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Risk in Adults.9, 10

The revised guidelines—issued by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology on November 1211—will likely DOUBLE the number of Americans being prescribed these dangerous drugs, bringing the estimated total to a staggering 72 million people. The reason for this dramatic jump is because the guidelines now focus on risk factors rather thancholesterol levels. If you answer “yes” to ANY of the following four questions, the treatment protocol calls for a statin drug:

• Do you have heart disease?
• Do you have diabetes? (either type 1 or type 2)
• Is your LDL cholesterol above 190?
• Is your 10-year risk of a heart attack12 greater than 7.5 percent?

New Cholesterol Treatment Guidelines Likely to Do Far More Harm Than Good

Two fundamental flaws render these guidelines highly suspect. First of all, 12 of the 16 panel members who created these guidelines are affiliated with more than 50 different drug companies, many of which manufacture cholesterol-lowering drugs. Secondly, the calculator created to ascertain your 10-year heart attack risk has been programmed in such a way as to make patients out of virtually everyone—health status or cholesterol levels be damned.

How convenient!

As it stands, the guideline committee has vowed to examine the flaws to determine if and what changes are needed to make it more accurate. Until then, please be aware that the cardiovascular risk calculator13 appears to overestimate your risk by anywhere from 75 to 150 percent!

Also, beware that the new guideline14 does away with the previous recommendation to use the lowest drug dose possible—a strategy that typically meant you’d end up being prescribed a low-dose statin along with one or more other cholesterol-lowering medications. Instead, it focuses on statin-only treatment, and at higher dosages, ostensibly to eliminate the need for additional drugs. But if you don’t need ANY drug to begin with, why take a much higher dose of a drug that is well-known for having potentially serious side effects?

There are over 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to increased cancer risk, and the list just keeps getting longer. Prescribing statins as “preventive medicine” to cut heart disease risk is just as insanely counterproductive as the low-fat craze with its preponderance of trans fats and sugars.

Consider this: As of 2011, Americans over the age of 65 numbered 41.4 million,15 and according to estimates, the new statin treatment guidelines will raise the number of American statin users to an estimated 72 million! I do not foresee the end result of medicating virtually every adult American being a good one... It is obvious to anyone that understands natural health that this is a disaster in the works, as the evidence of harm from statins is overwhelming.

Better Alternatives to Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs

Meanwhile, studies largely support the notion of using exercise as a cholesterol-lowering strategy. This makes sense, as being of a healthy weight and exercising regularly creates a healthy feedback loop that optimizes and helps maintain appropriate glucose and insulin levels through optimization of insulin receptor sensitivity. And, as I’ve mentioned before, insulin resistance—primarily driven by excessive consumption of refined sugars and grains along with lack of exercise—is the underlying factor of not only heart disease, but nearly all chronic disease that can take years off your life.

One recent meta-review16 compared the effectiveness of exercise versus drug interventions on mortality outcomes for four common conditions, including heart disease. After reviewing 305 randomized controlled trials, which included nearly 339,300 people, they found “no statistically detectable differences” between physical activity and cholesterol lowering medications for heart disease.

The two drugs included in the evaluation were statins and beta blockers. The only time drugs beat exercise was for the recovery from heart failure, in which case diuretic medicines produced a better outcome.

Exercise was in fact found to be so potent a strategy that the researchers suggested drug companies ought to be required to include it for comparison when conducting clinical trials for new drugs! Previous research has also shown that exercise alone can reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease by a factor of three.17 You’d be wise to pay attention to how you exercise, though.

Most people still think that in order to improve your cardiovascular fitness, endurance training is a must. But this is actually not true. Quite the contrary. High-intensity interval training, which requires but a fraction of the time compared to conventional cardio, has been shown to be FAR more efficient, and more effective.

This type of physical activity mimics the movements of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which included short bursts of high-intensity activities, but not long-distance running. This, researchers say, is what your body is hard-wired for. Basically, by exercising in short bursts, followed by periods of recovery, you recreate exactly what your body needs for optimum health. In the case of high intensity exercises, less really is more. You can get all the benefits you need in just a 20-minute session performed twice to three times a week.

Take-Home Message

We’ve covered a lot of ground here, but the take home message can be summarized as follows. If you want to prevent heart disease, you basically need to do the converse of what conventional medicine tells you. So, to prevent heart disease:

• DO eat unprocessed saturated animal fats, and don’t listen to the media, as you will benefit from these fats. Many may also benefit from increasing the healthful fat in their diet to 50-85 percent of daily calories
• AVOID all sugars, including processed fructose and grains if you are insulin and leptin resistant. It doesn’t matter if they are conventional or organic, as a high-sugar diet promotes insulin and leptin resistance, which is a primary driver of heart disease
• DO exercise regularly, as physical activity along with a healthy diet of whole, preferably organic, foods may be just as potent—if not more potent—than cholesterol-lowering drugs
• AVOID statins, as the side effects of these drugs are numerous, while the benefits are debatable. In my view, the only group of people who may benefit from a cholesterol-lowering medication are those with genetic familial hypercholesterolemia. This is a condition characterized by abnormally high cholesterol, which tend to be resistant to lifestyle strategies like diet and exercise

Related articles

• Heart of the Matter - How We Got So Far Down the Wrong Track in Our Efforts to Prevent Heart Disease
• FDA Sued, Forced to Remove Safety Status on Trans Fats
• The Missing Link to Better Health? Magnesium
• New Cholesterol Treatment Guidelines Could Double the Number of People on Dangerous Statins
• Inside Look at Sustainable Farming in America
• Saturated Fat NOT the Cause of Heart Disease

FDA Sued, Forced to Remove Safety Status on Trans Fats

English: Logo of the . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Dr. Mercola

For the past 60 years, saturated animal fats have been wrongfully accused of causing heart disease, despite mounting evidence showing that saturated fat is actually critical for optimal health while trans fat is the dietary fat causing heart disease.

Trans fat, found in margarine, vegetable shortening, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils became widely popularized as a “healthier alternative” to saturated animal fats like butter and lard around the mid-1950’s. Its beginnings go back 100 years though, to Proctor & Gamble’s creation of Crisco in 1911.1

In 1961, the American Heart Association began encouraging Americans to limit dietary fat, particularly animal fats, in order to reduce their risk of heart disease. In the decades since, despite low-fat diets becoming increasingly part of the norm, heart disease rates have soared.

It’s been a long time coming, but on November 7, 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it is now considering removing partially hydrogenated oils—the primary source of trans fats—from the list of "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) ingredients.2

The FDA will accept comments for 60 days, after which a permanent decision will be made. If finalized, the FDA’s decision means that food manufacturers can no longer use partially hydrogenated oils, i.e. trans fats, in their products without jumping through hoops to get special approval.

The comment period began November 8, 2013. I urge you to submit your comment to the FDA, telling them you want them to finalize its determination that partially hydrogenated oil is no longer general recognized as safe for use in food.

You can submit comments electronically to the FDA docket on regulations.gov. Make sure to use docket number FDA-2013-N-1317. To submit comments by mail, send to FDA at the following address. Again remember to include the agency name and docket number:

Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305)
Food and Drug Administration
5630 Fishers Lane, Rm. 1061
Rockville, MD 20852

This is the First Step Toward Eliminating Dangerous Trans Fats

This is a remarkable turnaround, and I personally could not be more pleased by this proposed change. This is the first step towards the truth, informing consumers that trans fats are a primary culprit causing premature death. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also called for the elimination of trans fats from the global food supply.3

Unfortunately, the FDA is still holding fast to its ignorant view on saturated animal fats, urging people to “choose products that have the lowest combined amount of saturated fat, cholesterol and trans fat.”4 As I will discuss below, this advice may still cause more harm than good.  You can't expect much from this department, after spending decades spreading misinformation and creating horrible policy - they don't want to look foolish by admitting their faults.

The Hazards of Trans Fats

Trans fats are formed when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil during food processing in order to make it solidify. This process, known as hydrogenation, makes fats less likely to spoil, so foods stay fresh longer, have a longer shelf life and also have a less greasy feel.

However, the end result is a completely unnatural fat that causes cellular dysfunction. According to the FDA, 12 percent of all processed foods contain at least one partially hydrogenated oil, aka trans fat.5

But virtually any food made with or fried in partially hydrogenated oils could potentially contain trans fat, even if it’s not listed on the label. A loophole allows food manufacturers to forgo listing trans fat on the label if it contains less than half a gram per serving. In many cases, this is why some foods have such ridiculously tiny serving sizes.

If you eat a few servings, each containing half a gram of trans fat, you may actually ingest a physiologically significant amount of this deadly fat. So to truly avoid trans fats, you need to read the label and look for more than just 0 grams of trans fat.

Check the ingredients and look for partially hydrogenated oil. If the product lists this ingredient, it likely contains trans fat.

It’s important to keep your intake of trans fat as low as possible, if you eat it at all, as even low amounts can pose grave health risks. In fact, increasing your daily consumption of trans fats from 2 grams to 4.67 grams increases your risk of heart disease by 30 percent!6

Research has also found that trans fats contribute to cancer, bone problems, hormonal imbalance and skin disease; infertility, difficulties in pregnancy and problems with lactation; low birth weight, growth problems, and learning disabilities in children.

Trans Fats May Be Responsible for Up to 20,000 Heart Attacks Annually

According to CDC director Thomas Frieden,7 an estimated 5,000 Americans die from heart disease caused by dietary trans fats each year, and another 15,000 will get heart disease as a result of eating too many trans fats. Other CDC statistics suggest that as many as 20,000 heart attacks could be avoided each year by eliminating trans fats from the food supply.8

Trans fat intake has steadily decreased over the past several years, According to FDA estimates, Americans consumed an average of one gram of trans fat per day in 2012, compared to 4.6 grams per day in 2003. However, according to the Institute of Medicine, trans fat is unsafe at any level.

The Hypocrisy of the CSPI Revealed

Despite scientific evidence, there’s been a lot of controversy surrounding the potential harm of trans fats, and some organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has vacillated back and forth on their recommendations. CSPI followed a similar process with aspartame, initially showing no concern but once popularized ends up changing positions.  As recently reported by The Atlantic:9

“In the 1980s, some scientists began to associate heart disease with saturated fats, and in response, groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the National Heart Savers Association (NHSA) began to hound manufacturers for “poisoning America ... by using saturated fats,” and as a result “nearly all targeted firms responded by replacing saturated fats with trans fats,” as David Schleifer wrote in 2012 for the journal Technology and Culture.10   At the time, many restaurants used beef fat for frying, which groups like CSPI believed was far worse than hydrogenated oils...”

After years of campaigning and pressuring fast food restaurants and food companies to switch from (healthy) animal fat and tropical oils to (far more harmful) vegetable oils,11 the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is now applauding the FDA’s decision to revoke trans fats’ GRAS status,12 and has removed information touting the benefits of partially hydrogenated oils from its website.  Before applauding the FDA's decision on trans fats, they were a primary group promoting this dangerous substance.  For these reasons, CSPI is not high on my list of reliable resources.

Ten years ago, the Weston A Price Foundation noted the CSPI’s hypocritical stance on this issue, and questioned whether CSPI might actually be promoting the interests of the soy industry rather than public health:13

“It is impossible to measure the hazards and grief that Liebman and Jacobson--the leaders of the major nutrition "activist" consumer organization--have inflicted on many millions of an unknowing public--because CSPI's campaign was wildly successful. Thanks to CSPI, healthy traditional fats have almost completely disappeared from the food supply, replaced by manufactured trans fats known to cause many diseases.

By 1990, most fast food chains had switched to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. In 1982, a McDonald's meal of chicken McNuggets, large order of fries and a Danish or pie contained 2.4 grams of trans fat, out of a total of 54 grams of fat. In 1992, that same meal contained 19.2 grams trans fats, a 700 percent increase.

... Who benefits? Soy, or course. Eighty percent of all partially hydrogenated oil used in processed foods in the US comes from soy, as does 70 percent of all liquid oil. CSPI claims that its [financial] support comes from subscribers to its Nutrition Action newsletter... but in fact, in CSPI's January, 1991 newsletter, Jacobson notes that "our effort was ultimately joined. . . by the American Soybean Association."

FDA Does the Right Thing Once Their Backs are Against the Wall...

Most news agencies are hailing the FDA’s draft decision to revoke trans fats’ GRAS status as a sign that the agency is working (after all). But many of you may be wondering what spurred the FDA to take corrective action now, after decades of research have reiterated just how harmful trans fats are. What prompted an agency best known for corruption and conflicts of interest to act in the best interest of Americans’ health now?

Well, as it turns out, the agency’s decision comes right on the heels of a lawsuit filed by Dr. Fred Kummerow, a 99-year old heart disease researcher who has been studying heart disease for about 60 years. He first wrote about the health hazards of trans fats all the way back in 1957.14 Dr. Kummerow filed a citizen petition with the FDA in August of 2009 to have trans fats banned, based on the scientific evidence of harm. The agency is legally required to respond within 180 days. Four years later, no response had been issued, so Dr. Kummerow resorted to suing the agency.15

The lawsuit, Kummerow vs US Food and Drug Administration et al,16 was filed August 9, 2013 with the Illinois Central District Court. Listed defendants include Kathleen Sebelius, Michael M Landa, US Dept of Health and Human Services, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Margaret Hamburg, and the FDA.

According to an August 13, 2013 report by FoodNavigator.com,17 Dr. Kummerow “is seeking a judgment declaring that the FDA’s failure to ban the use of partially hydrogenated oils... and its delay in issuing a final response to his 2009 petition, violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act.” Dr. Kummerow also sought “an order compelling the FDA to respond to his petition and to ban partially hydrogenated oils ‘unless a complete administrative review finds new evidence for their safety.’”

Considering the fact that evidence of trans fat safety is scant to say the least, it appears the FDA had little choice but to do what it should have done years ago, which is address a well-known toxin in the food supply. It’s just too bad that they have to be sued in order to do their job. According to a report by the St. Louis Dispatch:18

“When asked whether Kummerow’s lawsuit had led to the FDA’s action, a spokeswoman for the agency said she could not comment on pending litigation. But on Thursday, attorneys for the FDA filed the agency’s trans fat determination as an exhibit in Kummerow’s lawsuit, and their proposal for the ban included a mention of Kummerow’s 2009 petition. “There’s no way to know if his petition or the lawsuit was the initiating event (for the ban), but the timing is interesting,” said Diana Yates, life sciences editor at the University of Illinois.”

Chris Masterjohn, PhD has been working with Dr. Kummerow for a number of years, and I recently interviewed him about this issue, and how Dr. Kummerow’s lawsuit may have been the driving force behind the FDA’s decision to finally take action.

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is creator and author of Cholesterol-and-Health.Com, a web site dedicated to extolling the benefits of traditional, nutrient-dense, cholesterol-rich foods and to elucidating the many fascinating roles that cholesterol plays within the body. Chris is a frequent contributor to Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and is a perennial speaker at the annual Wise Traditions conference, and has published seven first-author, peer-reviewed publications.

He obtained a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois where he is studying interactions between vitamins A, D, and K. The opinions he expresses in this interview represent his independent analysis and do not necessarily represent the positions of the University of Illinois.

Don’t Be Fooled—Saturated Fat is Not Associated with Increased Heart Disease Risk

As mentioned earlier, while the hazards of trans fats are now officially recognized, government health agencies and the medical establishment as a whole are still holding on to the outdated hypothesis that saturated animal fats and tropical oils are bad for your health as well. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you care about your health you’d be wise to reconsider the advice to follow a strict low-fat diet. Mounting scientific evidence supports saturated fat as a necessary part of a heart healthy diet, and firmly debunks the myth that saturated fat promotes heart disease. For example:

• In a 1992 editorial published in the Archives of Internal Medicine,19 Dr. William Castelli, a former director of the Framingham Heart study, stated:
• "In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’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."
• A 2010 meta-analysis,20 which pooled data from 21 studies and included nearly 348,000 adults, found no difference in the risks of heart disease and stroke between people with the lowest and highest intakes of saturated fat.
• Another 2010 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition21 found that a reduction in saturated fat intake must be evaluated in the context of replacement by other macronutrients, such as carbohydrates.
When you replace saturated fat with a higher carbohydrate intake, particularly refined carbohydrate, you exacerbate insulin resistance and obesity, increase triglycerides and small LDL particles, and reduce beneficial HDL cholesterol. The authors state that dietary efforts to improve your cardiovascular disease risk should primarily emphasize the limitation of refined carbohydrate intake, and weight reduction.

What Makes for a Heart Healthy Diet?

It’s important to realize that saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a number of important health benefits, and your body requires them for the proper function of your:

Cell membranes	Heart	Bones (to assimilate calcium)
Liver	Lungs	Hormones
Immune system	Satiety (reducing hunger)	Genetic regulation

To prevent heart disease it’s critical to address your insulin- and leptin resistance, which is the result of eating a diet too high in sugars and grains, not fat. As decades of research has shown, dietary fat has very little to do with your heart disease risk—with the exception of trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which have been linked to increased heart disease risk, even in small amounts. So, to safely and effectively reverse insulin and leptin resistance, thereby lowering your heart disease risk, you need to:

1. Avoid sugar, fructose, grains, and processed foods
2. Eat a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replace the grain carbs with:
• Large amounts of vegetables
• Low-to-moderate amount of high quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals)
• As much highly quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monosaturated from animal- and tropical oil sources). Most people actually need upwards of 50-70 percent fats in their diet for optimal health—a far cry from the 10 percent currently recommended.

One of the most important fats your body needs for optimal health is animal-based omega-3. Deficiency in this essential fat can cause or contribute to very serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. For more information about omega-3's and the best sources of this fat, please review this previous article.  Besides animal-based omega-3 fats, other sources of healthful fats to add to your diet include:

Avocados	Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk	Raw dairy	Organic pastured egg yolks
Coconuts and coconut oil	Unheated organic nut oils	Raw nuts, such as, almonds, pecans, macadamia, and seeds	Grass-fed meats

Healthy Fat Tips to Live By

The most effective prevention strategy against heart disease you’ll likely ever find is your diet—the foods you do and do not eat every day. For example, a Mediterranean-style diet has been shown to be three times more effective than statin drugs at reducing cardiovascular mortality. A Mediterranean-style diet is basically a whole-food diet. And that is indeed key for any healthy diet.  The answer to your heart disease concerns is to EAT REAL FOOD. This change alone will dramatically reduce the amount of refined sugar and processed fructose in your diet. It will also address the issue of healthful versus harmful fats in your diet. Besides eliminating processed foods, the following tips can help ensure you’re eating the right fats for your health:

• Use organic butter made from raw grass-fed milk instead of margarines and vegetable oil spreads.
• Use coconut oil for cooking. It is far superior to any other cooking oil and is loaded with health benefits.
• Use olive oil COLD, drizzled over salad or fish, for example. It is not an ideal cooking oil as it is easily damaged by heat.
• Following my nutrition plan will teach you to focus on healthy whole foods instead of processed junk food.
• To round out your healthy fat intake, be sure to eat raw fats, such as those from avocados, raw dairy products, and olive oil, and also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.

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