It was never butter’s fault, was it?
Six in ten adults in the US have a chronic disease, and four in ten adults have two or more [CDC, 2021].
The last 120 years of American medical and nutrition history, and the scientific developments of the past 70, have shown us that man-made fats, refined carbohydrates and combinations thereof, not natural saturated fats, are the cause of all metabolic maladies plaguing the US society.
Up until recently, word on health street was that fats, particularly saturated ones, must be blackballed from our everyday victuals. Let’s face it, none of us have been spared by the smear campaign against fat throughout the last 5 decades: the words ‘non-fat’ and ‘low-fat’ had become so commonplace and encoded in our diet language that most of us are still leery of scientists saying ‘healthy’ and ‘saturated fat’ in the same sentence. We are now in full-blown culture shock: who would have ever thought you could eat butter and eggs and not die of a heart attack? Well, it turns out you can. While we take time to process and unlearn disproved fat dogmas, we are faced with the unsettling certitude that in spite of all the butter we were told not to eat for the better part of nearly 50 years, the needle has moved in the wrong direction: we are all exponentially fatter, and nutrition-related chronic diseases are still crowding statistics. Big Pharma can happily attest to that.
While boycotting all fats was the crux of this mass eating creed, sparked in the late ‘70s by the findings of a metabolic research still in its infancy (as it pertained to modern nutrition), it was the wholesome, natural fats that took the brunt, much to the delight and profit of processed food makers, who could now replace costly prime ingredients with cheap surrogates and fillers. In 1977, bona fide dietary guidelines set forth by the US Senate that had funded the research, maintained that a diet higher in naturally occurring sugars, lower in both saturated fats and dietary cholesterol and favoring polyunsaturated fats was the solution to halt the rise in cardiovascular events. At that time, dietary cholesterol was still wrongfully indicted for single-handedly wreaking cardiovascular havoc on our health. With relation to carbohydrates, in the government’s defense, the increase posited by the new health decree referred to complex carbs from vegetables, fruit and whole grains, but that part got lost in translation: Americans heard fats are bad, carbs are good, and that echoed to food manufacturers loud and clear. The moment our beloved fats were ousted, a consoling love affair with carbs began, with food corporations playing cupid.
In essence, Americans never really stopped eating fats at all, they simply reached for the wrong ones while loading up on carbs on a rebound from the saturated fat desertion. In retrospect, distress had already started creeping in when America was cued to ditch butter and lard for industrial trans-fats, with the new hydrogenated margarine being inducted into the US food supply in the early 20th century.
During the ‘50s, Ancel Keys, a notoriously pontifical American physiologist who investigated the effects of diet on cardiovascular disease, had already begun hypothesizing that dietary cholesterol from animal fats was causing heart attacks in America. It was his ‘Seven Countries Studies’, a flawed and skewed epidemiological study that started in 1956 and was published in 1978, that first concluded that dietary cholesterol was the top contributor to heart disease. Keys was nearly unanimously accused to have chosen seven countries he knew in advance would support his hypothesis, and of having submitted no viable evidence in support of his findings. Many scientists openly disagreed with Keys’ conclusions throughout the following decades. Interestingly, as early as 1966, 12 years before the Seven Countries Study conclusions were fully divulged, American physicians George Campbell and Thomas L Cleave had also published Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis and the Saccharine Disease, in which they argued that Western chronic ills such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, peptic ulcers and appendicitis were caused by "refined carbohydrate disease”, describing the already widespread addiction to sugars.
One of the main arguments by several other scientists, against Keys’ untenable theory, pertained to his observation of the low incidence of cardiovascular issues among Mediterranean populations, as compared to the US, which he attributed to a diet low in saturated fats. Dissenters hypothesized instead that the low incidence of heart disease in countries like Italy and Greece (which were included in Keys’ study) could conceivably be due to a low-carb diet with no polyunsaturated or trans-fats, since Extra Virgin Olive Oil (a healthy monounsaturated fat), butter and lard (saturated fats) were typically consumed. Clearly, any pushback to Keys’ shabbily conducted study, notably by the many scientists pointing to refined carbs as the real culprit for metabolic diseases, was promptly muzzled by processed food manufacturers’ lobbyists and the public health organizations they funded.
Between the late ‘70s and the ‘90s corporate food companies fueled the infatuation with sugar and the fear of fats by flooding the market with carb-laden, low-fat foods that went flying off the shelves. In the ‘80s, with the gracious help of ubiquitous mass media, indoctrination began to the alleged health benefits of so-called vegetable oils and of good old, hydrogenated margarine, which were (and are to this day) chemically obtained from seeds and obscurely processed to have the appearance of real oil and butter. Many of us are all-too familiar with the ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ propaganda, and some may remember Eleanor Roosevelt championing margarine in a famous TV commercial in 1959. Margarine and the likes of it are made by the addition of hydrogen atoms to unstable oil molecules, which turns oils into solid fats with a buttery mouthfeel: these engineered lipids are known as trans-fats. Americans were told to reduce saturated fats, and these were nice little viable, profitable impostors that also added texture, taste and a much longer shelf-life to industrial foods. This was not the first time in history that bottom-feeding manufacturers of chemically transmuted fats seized such an opportunity: whereas during the Depression and second World War they cleverly exploited the economic downturn and shortage of animal products to market budget, factory-made ingredients, this time the marketing angle was provided by none other than health science. No first lady commercial needed for this one, it was a slam dunk.
The bare truth is that the persuasion work of popular health and nutrition media is largely commissioned by multinational corporations that are not exactly pillars of honesty, and are certainly not known for having people’s well-being at heart. What is worse is that the medical science community itself will sometimes slyly move health goal posts on consumers, not to mention rename the game altogether, if need be, to benefit sponsors’ agenda. This was the case in 1948 with the American Heart Association getting hefty funding by Procter & Gamble to promote their infamous Crisco, a hydrogenated fat made with transmuted, harmful cottonseed oil, routinely used to make soap, dyes, roofing tar and explosives (the company has since changed the formula to a mix of palm, soy and canola oils – still a highly inflammatory, metabolically unsafe compound). The guidelines of the American Heart Associations still sadly promote a high-carb, low-fat, low dietary cholesterol diet, in spite of universal scientific approbation of disproving findings, possibly because of pharmaceutical companies and commercial sponsors with a vested interest in keeping things status quo.
By the early ‘90s, the trans-fat cartel’s foundations began to shake, as new medical research started to reveal that trans-fats, the industrially produced ones (not the naturally occurring ones), are linked to an increased risk of diverse diseases. A higher incidence of metabolic dysfunctions, stroke, coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, type 2 Diabetes, fatty liver disease and neurodegenerative disease, correlates to trans-fat consumption even in amounts as small as 5 grams per day. Per science, a 2% increase in consumption raises the risk of getting some of these illnesses by 23%. It took, however, another decade for research to kick up enough dust that some governments in Europe began setting legal limits to the use of synthetic trans fats, with Denmark on the forefront with the 2003 ban. In 2006, the FDA required the food industry to disclose the amount of trans fat in food on the Nutrition Facts label. Later, in 2013, an initial determination was made by the FDA that partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs) were no longer ‘generally recognized as safe’ (GRAS), but it wasn’t until 2015 that an actual ban on the use of trans fats in amounts exceeding 0.5gr was put in place in the US, giving manufacturers 3 years to change their formulas. However, not surprisingly, manufacturers haven’t exactly raised a white flag: a 0% trans fat claim under that amount is still perfectly legal. To locate hidden trans fats in foods, look for the words ‘ partially hydrogenated’ on the nutrition facts label, rather than falling for the percentage ruse. Trans fats can still be found in foods like crackers, cookies, cakes, frozen pies and other baked goods, snack foods (likes microwave popcorn), frozen pizza, and coffee creamers.
Much like their vegetable oil parents, hydrogenated trans fats cause alterations of cell membranes and energy pathway signaling, and trigger rampant inflammation. They make fat cells overly receptive to insulin, causing them to store more fat and eventually spew excess fatty acids out into the bloodstream; the ensuing high plasma levels of triglycerides trigger insulin resistance in muscle and brain cells, spiking glucose levels in the blood. The end result is more body fat and a downregulated metabolism of carbs, a vicious cycle that leads to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease and premature death. It is crucial for people with any of these pre-existing conditions to stay away from artificial polyunsaturated fats. What makes it frightening is that the half-life (the time it takes the body to dispel half of a substance) of these synthetic lipids is 52 days, during which they freely wreak havoc on all systems in the body.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a goal of complete and sustained elimination of industrially produced trans fats in the global food supply by 2023. It cannot happen fast enough.
To add insult to injury, multinationals have taken the carb/fat foul play to the next level, with the sneaky addition of sensory chemicals that make processed and fast foods taste satisfying and smell tantalizing from a mile away, blunt the brain’s innate penchant for seeking variety by combining sweet/salty/sour/umami/spicy flavors (so you don’t go look for food elsewhere), and create a toxic addiction: the country has therefore been eating way too much of everything from soup to nuts, with a bunch of snacks in between. The buildup of heart-disease promoting, carcinogenic chemicals in the body is still at an all-time high in some areas of the United States, where obesity and endocrine dysfunctions are prevalent. In the war on fats, as it turns out, we were the unsuspecting casualties.
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References:
https://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/labelling_nutrition/trans-fat-food_en