Ok girls, if you haven’t heard me say this yet hear it now: Fat is not the enemy!

Healthy fats, monounsaturated and some polyunsaturated, even saturated fats all have beneficial effects on every system in the body. Fat actually powers our metabolism. It causes no blood sugar spikes which lead to inflammation which puts us at increased risk of the diseases of aging. It is critical for preservation of bone, immunity, and energy throughout the day.

Adding fat to a carb will slow down the blood sugar response and it will help you feel full–one key way to prevent overeating. But this post is about Alzheimer’s and related kinds of disease processes and how you can help someone you love and yourself.

Today I read in Dr. Whitaker’s newsletter a story about a new Alzheimer’s drug which is actually fat in a pill. A man who at 59 was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, put on Aracept and a few other drugs, but declined over the years following his diagnosis.  His wife, a doctor, (Dr. Newport) was made aware of a clinical trial evaluating a new Alzheimer’s drug. When her husband was not approved for the trial she did some research to find out what the active ingredient in this new drug was. To her surprise, the active ingredient was medium chain triglycerides (MCTs). These are natural fatty acids abundant in coconut oil.

She started giving her husband coconut oil and with the first dose, “a light switch came on” said the patient. Maybe I should tell you that at this point he was unable to use a calculator, work, type or remember to eat.

One dose! Why it worked is too long to go into here but it has to do with ketones which are the body’s alternative energy source. These are the very things produced and burned as fuel when you do an Atkins type eating program.

It’s a remarkable story and just one example of how a food we’ve been told for years is a “bad, saturated fat” is being rightfully shown as an important part of a healthy diet. Even Big Pharma found something to love in this healthy fat.

The drug they based on MCTs is called Axona and is available as a “medical food.” That phrase makes me laugh just thinking about it. Now the medical world wants to claim natural foods as their own? If you were to take enough of this “food” to help brain function throughout the day you’d have to take it three times per day at a cost of $300/month. According to Dr. Whitaker, insurance companies are not reimbursing for it at this time.

Dr. Newport has a website with more information. 

Food for thought and for those who want to keep on thinking clearly.

You might want to read this then. For some time I’ve been hearing squeaks from alternative practitioners that canola oil is not a good for you monounsaturated, flavor neutral, (I don’t like the flavor at all), all purpose oil.

After catching up with both sides of the debate, which included reading Dr. Fred Pescatore’s article “The Real Story on Canola Oil (“Can-Ugly Oil”). If you are not familiar with Dr. Pescatore, he wrote The Hamptons Diet described on his website as, “The Hamptons Diet takes the best of the Mediterranean Diet and the best of controlled carbohydrate eating and puts them together in the context of whole foods (organic whenever possible), minimally processed, nothing artificial, and with minimal use of sugar alcohols.” He also educates about monounsaturated fats, the right balance of Omega 6 – to Omega 3 fatty acids, and overall health vs weight loss.

In addition to Dr. Pescatore’s work, Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon have written copious articles and books on the subject of safe and healthy fats vs the unhealthy ones, including the one you can link to above titled, The Great Con-Ola. You might be surprised to know that they have reams of proof to back up the idea that saturated fat does not kill people. And that using only monounsaturated fats with no saturates–such as those found in meat, eggs, coconut–is not only unnatural but it’s causing health problems.

Listen, canola oil–or Canadian oil, so named for the Canadian scientist who first brought it to the public eye–is a highly processed, non-nutritive version of a natural oil used for many hundreds of years in Asian countries. The modern version has too high a smoke point and as such becomes toxic with trans fats when used for sauteeing or frying. Oh, and did I say it comes with more trans fat than margarine? According to Jonny Bowden in The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, the Omega 3s in canola oil–usually a healthy thing–”become rancid and foul-smelling when subjected to the high temperatures needed to extract the oil. Therefore they have to be deodorized. The deodorizing process turns a large number of the omega-3 fatty acids into trans fats.”

He goes on to site a study from the U at Gainsville Florida which found trans fat levels as high as 4.6% in commercial canola oil, even more than margarine.

Then there is the genetically modified aspect. Rape seed, from which we get canola oil, was originally genetically modified  to lower the amount of something called erucic acid, a fatty acid that has potentially dangerous heart health implications. With the help of Monsanto it has continued through more GM permutations to make it more commercially viable which means less healthy.

So I ask you? What’s healthy about this oil? Producing a cheap alternative to olive oil and hiring the best marketers over the years has allowed the food industry–with help from the mega empire of evil Monsanto–to put a healthy spin on a mega profitable unhealthy product.

After probably years of eating products with this unsafe oil and pouring it on salads and into muffin recipes it’s time to stop. Replace canola oil with coconut, olive, nut oils, butter, ghee etc. Found in nature, processed minimally, ahh, now that does a body good!