This is a story you don’t want to miss because it will put the entire history of food supply from the past sixty years into perspective.
If you’ve been following The Whole Journey for any length of time, you know I get pretty fired up about how bad “vegetable oil” (soybean & canola) is for your health.
And enough already with the anti-fat crusade, right?
If you’ve been following health news this past month, you’ll see the mainstream is finally catching on that the idea that (high quality) saturated fat causes heart disease is a bunch of you know what. 🙂
Now the full story has been released by The Wall Street Journal about how one scientist from the University of Minnesota in the 1950’s was on a mission to champion the idea that saturated fat led to heart disease in a desperate attempt to explain America’s #1 killer.
His determination was based upon on flawed study called “The Seven Countries” study.
This gentleman went on to take a seat on the nutrition committee at the American Heart Association in the 60’s (so he must know what he’s talking about, right? 😉 and then persuaded the U.S. Senate to promote a low-fat (demonizing saturated fat), high vegetable oil, high carb diet in the 70’s.
And thus our downfall began.
Hello, Type 2 diabetes. Hello, obesity.
In came Proctor & Gamble with Crisco and the onset of using soybean and canola oil (margarine) for everything.
During this short time, we had an 8% increase in consumption of (toxic) vegetable oil in the American diet, the biggest increase in consumption of any type of food over the past century.
Early clinical trials of this increase in vegetable oil showed people suffering from higher rates of gallstones (because the body isn’t designed to process this kind of foreign fat).
Cancer rates rose, as did violent behavior and suicide because of changes in brain chemistry due to fatty acid imbalance and cholesterol depletion.
Cholesterol is a very healthy molecule that protects our brain. Blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming the firefighter for starting the fire.
Using vegetable oil instead of saturated fat to avoid a heart attack is like sending the firefighters away and then wondering why your house burnt down.
I could go on, but the rest is all in this week’s Food as Medicine episode including what fats you should consume and why.
Read the full story here. It is well worth the time to read to understand why this study was flawed and how this is an example where science can sometimes get skewed by politics and bias.
There is fantastic news in this whole thing. The light bulb is going ON and things are shifting fast.
Now hopefully restaurants are next to stop using these toxic oils to keep their food budgets down.
Stay tuned. While I love Whole Foods and so appreciate how they make good food readily available, I would also like to see them using a few more, well, whole foods.
So I’m going to start a petition soon to ask them to get soybean and canola oil out of their hot/prepared foods bar. Those of us who shop there are obviously willing to spend more on food to protect our health, so let’s hope they hear our voice and start using better oils soon.
Huge thanks for being part of this tribe. There is strength in numbers and together we are reaching a very exciting tipping food in food and public health history.
If you liked this blog, you’ll love:
A New Approach to Cholesterol - A Very Healthy Molecule
Balancing Hormones By Way of Increasing Cholesterol
How Healthy Fats and Oils Can CHANGE Your Health
Blog Resource Links:
The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
