A long crawl from NYC back to the Hamptons yesterday on the Hampton Jitney allowed plenty of time to continue learning from Gary Taube, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I mentioned this scientific look at the history of current dietary recommendations and how most of them are not based on facts but rather on biased interpretations of the truth even in the face of new evidence, last month.

My point is not to slag anyone whose job it is to make health recommendations who chooses to stick with the status quo–people need their jobs after all and in this day and age it takes massive effort to effect change among the largest health organizations. Change is going to come though and I want to be a part of it. Speaking out about outdated science is my way of helping usher in the changes we so badly need in order to reverse the rates of heart disease and diabetes.

I’ve reported, as recently as yesterday, that there is no provable link between consumption of saturated fat and heart disease. A leading journal published the results of a meta-analysis supporting this claim. The same groups that advocate lowering saturated fat, increasing carbs and vegetable oils, claim that monounsaturated fat is the healthiest because they lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL.

Here’s a twist you would not have expected. As quoted from Taube’s book on page 168, “The majority of fat found in red meat, eggs and bacon is not saturated fat but the very same monounsaturated fat as in olive oil.” This information can be found by anyone at the USDA’s Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. (And you can get weekly audio emails with this kind of myth busting information by signing up for my Midlife Myth Busting Audio Postcards.)

Let’s stick with Taube as he dissects a porterhouse steak nutritionally–it’s compelling. “Consider a porterhouse steak with a quarter-inch layer of fat. After broiling, this steak will reduce to almost equal parts fat and protein. Fifty-one percent of the fat is monounsaturated, of which 90% is oleic acid. Saturated fat constitutes 45% of the total fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which will increase HDL cholesterol while having no effect on LDL. The remaining 4% of the fat is polyunsaturated which lowers LDL but has no meaningful effect on HDL.” (HDL in case you’ve forgotten is the measure of total cholesterol we are encouraged to raise because it is health protective.)

“In sum,” Gary continues, “perhaps as much as 70% of the fat content of a porterhouse steak will improve the relative levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, compared with what they would be if carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed.”

So what to do? Limit vegetable oils with the exception of olive oil, flax seed oil, coconut and avocado oils. Eat plenty of plants and include plenty of organic, farm raised meats, wild fish, cage free eggs high in Omega 3s, and limit sugar–including the foods that turn quickly into sugar in the digestive system. And keep an open mind to new discoveries and the possibility that there are mighty forces in place who rely on the status quo to please their share holders. I’ve said it before, I’m not a conspiracy theorist and the links are obvious once you start looking.

Speaking of sugar I’m going to do a series of posts on just how big a player this one, ubiquitous substance is in the creation of lifestyle diseases and how you can have a sweet life without deprivation.

A little happy dance is in order if you fear eating butter, eggs, meat, cheese etc because of their alleged links to heart disease via increased cholesterol. For years I’ve been writing about research on the heath benefits of fats–saturated and otherwise when found naturally in foods–and it’s always heartening when some of the more conservative groups come to the same conclusions. I’m not  just a radical butter-loving-nut-promoting-beef-cheese-and-ice-cream-eating midlife crazy. Well maybe I am all of those things but damn, but you can’t accuse me of making up the science.

In the May issue of Dr. Steven Sinatra’s Heart, Health and Nutrition, he shares the findings of a recent meta-analysis on the effects of saturated fat as it relates–or doesn’t–to heart disease and stroke. A meta-analysis is a statistical review of multiple studies. According to Dr. S, “The review, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, crunched numbers from 21 previous studies involving nearly 350,000 adults.

The subjects, basically healthy to start, had all been surveyed about their dietary habits and then monitored for between 5 and 23 years. Researchers concluded there was no difference in the risk of cardiovascular disease between people with the lowest intake of sat fat and those with the highest.”

Now it gets even better:

“However, the study also revealed what dietary factors did contribute to heart disease—namely polyunsaturated vegetable oils and sugars. Canola, corn, safflower, sunflower, and similar vege oils become oxidized when heated and produce harmful trans fats that cause an inflammatory response in the body. Sugars also create dangerous inflammation when consumed in excess.”

Burger anyone? Look saturated fat raises both HDL and LDL cholesterol. The conventional wisdom held that LDL was “bad” for us and so these foods should be eliminated or kept to a minimum. The latest science points to inflammation as the culprit behind most lifestyle diseases–or at least a contributing factor–eliminating the leg to stand on for the argument that foods with saturated fat and by extension, cholesterol, must be banished.

As the veil is lifted on the marketing hype and government influence for gain that brought us to fear certain foods we will no doubt begin to reverse some of the lifestyle diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. If people come back to the table that serves natural meats, fish, and organic dairy–and moves away from foods made in labs, with grains as a base, with oils more suitable for engine lube than human food, then we will see a healthier midlife and beyond.

Never mind midlife, young life, baby life, 20-something lives; all can benefit from staying away from what really makes us fat and unhealthy.

So as the weather warms up and the ice cream store beckons, have some full fat, real ingredients. A little goes a long way in terms of satiety and your heart will thank you in the long run.

In the second in a series of 4 articles on the truth about cholesterol–why you want it and how lowering it by all means is not healthy–begins by looking at the different “parts” if you will of the cholesterol molecules.
We most commonly talk about and test for LDL or “bad” cholesterol and HDL or “good.” The L in those two acronyms stands for lipoprotein and is basically a coating around the cholesterol that allows it to be water soluble and therefore move around and work in our blood.
LDL cholesterol-low density lipoproteins carry cholesterol to the cells for repair work as well as the many other important functions they have. HDL, high density lipoproteins carry cholesterol away from the cells and arterial walls and back to the liver to be used or disposed of.

Here’s the sixty-four millions dollar question: how can one part of cholesterol be good and the other bad just because one travels in one direction and the other moves in another?

Here’s a little history:
In 1948 The Framingham Study was begun. It was designed to study heart disease and followed 5,000 men and women to determine some common traits among those who succumbed to the disease.
Here’s an important point, this study was observational, not a double blind, placebo controlled testing environment. It simply tracked people and checked in with them over the years to see what they were eating, their lifestyle habits, and it checked blood levels and health markers looking for commonalities in those that ended up with heart disease.
In 1961 cholesterol was “discovered’ and although the Framingham study had to date uncovered important lifestyle factors that promoted heart disease, like smoking, once cholesterol was “outed” the medical world locked on to it as a way to prevent heart disease. It may have made sense initially but the thousands of tests and research papers that were produced to prove it was the culprit have never been able to do so.

Enter Ancel Keys, by all reports a blustery, self important scientist from the U of Minnesota. According to Dr. Dwight Lundel “Keys’ theory, one he actively promoted to an increasingly health conscious public, was that an association existed between the rate of cardiovascular disease of a population, serum cholesterol and their intake of saturated fats.”

Keys was able to convince the US government that dietary fat equaled increased rates of heart disease and death but the proof is in the health statistics.
Consumption of dietary fat decreased from the 1960’s to the 1990’s but the rate of heart disease did not and instead, the incidence of obesity and Type II diabetes soared. As the fat got stripped from our diet–as did the Yumm factor–heart disease rates soared and so did rates of depression and anti-depression drug sales.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The people in the Framingham study ate what they wanted and the amount of saturated fats varied widely. No matter how they twisted their findings they could not prove a cause and effect relationship between the fat participants ate and the cholesterol floating in their blood.

At the end of the study–22 years after they began to compile research–the scientists concluded:

“There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and

the subsequent development of chronic heart disease in the study group.”

I’m going to end here today. Tomorrow I’ll explain a little bit about how low-fat-diets-save-lives became the nation’s health dogma. As you might expect is has something to do with politics, lobbyists and Big Pharma.

I’ll also reveal what aspects of cholesterol do relate to food and what foods are dangerous ones, the ones to avoid.

What if all you’ve been told about lowering cholesterol to prevent disease was just not true?

For the longest time I’ve been coming upon studies that buck the conventional–and very profitable-wisdom that cholesterol causes heart disease. The research I’ve been doing further disproves the link between what we eat and our cholesterol levels.

Now before your inner critic commandeers the floor, read on and I’ll do my best to lay a foundation of science to back up my title.

Cholesterol is manufactured by the liver and is essential for life. It is not, as so many people think, “fat in the blood.” It’s a waxy substance, soapy to the touch, and only 7% of it is found there. The other 93%, according to Dr. Owen Fanorow, “is located in every cell of the body, where its unique waxy, soapy consistency provides the cell membranes with their structural integrity and regulates the flow of nutrients into and waste products out of the cells.”

Here are a few of the roles cholesterol plays:

• Cholesterol is a precursor of vitamin D in the skin. When exposed to sunlight, this precursor molecule is converted to its active form for use in the body.
• Cholesterol is the main component of bile acids, which aid in the digestion of foods, particularly fatty foods. Without cholesterol we could not absorb the essential fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K from the food we eat.
• Cholesterol is necessary for normal growth and development of the brain and nervous system . Cholesterol coats the nerves and makes the transmission of nerve impulses possible.
• Cholesterol gives skin its ability to shed water.
• Cholesterol is important for normal growth and repair of tissues since every cell membrane and the organelles (the tiny structures inside the cells that carry out specific functions) within the cells are rich in cholesterol. For this reason newborn animals feed on milk or other cholesterol-rich foods, such as the yolks of eggs, which are there to provide food for the developing bird or chick embryos.

Let’s stop there though the list goes on and on. I have one more really important aspect of cholesterol’s importance to introduce now as it’s flu–infectious bug– season.

According to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, in his book Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You!, “Did you know that high cholesterol protects you against infectious diseases?” He cites many studies but this one stood out to me. (And understand that this is the Reader’s Digest version)

David Jacobs, Ph.D, Mayo Professor of Public Health followed more than 100,000 healthy individuals in the San Francisco Bay area for 15 years. He found that those who had low cholesterol to start the study had been admitted to the hospital more times for infectious diseases.

It is a known and accepted fact that bacteria and other such bugs may play an important role in heart failure. Without going in to a long explanation of why and how that works, suffice to say that researchers both here and abroad discovered that not only was mortality highest when immune function was not optimal but mortality was higher in the patients with the lowest cholesterol!

Maybe all this lowering of LDL cholesterol isn’t the healthy prescription it’s cracked up to be?

Tomorrow I’ll continue laying a foundation with more on the function of cholesterol in the body and whether or not your food choices cause your numbers to increase or not.  If you don’t want to wait for me to lay it all out here over the next few days I’d suggest you take a look at Dr. Dwight Lundell’s book, The Cholesterol Lie. Dr. Lundell was a heart surgeon, has performed over 5000 bypass surgeries, and felt he had to tell the world what he learned after seeing so many damaged hearts. His mission is to keep people off the operating table and his book will tell you how and why what we all now believe as gospel hasn’t got a prayer in terms of keeping us healthy.