Poor fat.

One day it’s blamed for heart disease and the next obesity.

Most people shudder when they hear the word “fat”. Gross, unsightly, artery-clogging, disease-causing; these are all adjectives that the mainstream media uses to describe fat.

Does fat really deserve these terrible monikers? Most definitely not.

Fat has been wrongfully (and falsely) accused of being a dietary villain, responsible for a million maladies and dis-eases and remedy to nearly none. Most people have been conditioned to fear fat, as if whatever fat they eat will instantaneously glue itself to their hips, tummies and arteries with a tenacious grip that can only be broken after seven hours on the Stairmaster.

This post is in defense of fat.

True, there are bad fats out there (just not the ones you think). When it comes to weight loss, including the real healthy fats in your diet is not only really healthy for you but it can help you burn off excess body fat in a simple, sustainable and, best of all, accelerated manner.

Let’s start by examining the HUGE FAT LIE that most people feel is written in stone.

HUGE FAT LIE #1: Saturated fat causes heart disease and cancer.

Yes, this is a lie.

This lie has been drilled into our nation’s nutritional paradigm by the incredibly clever and always deceitful mega food corporations. Sure, they’ll parade hundreds of peer-reviewed studies in front of you to validate the apparent need for low-fat and no-fat and fat-substitute products, but you know what is really funny?

The whole notion that saturated fat is bad for us is only a half century old, and it didn’t take root in our national conscience until maybe 40 years ago. The worst part about the “lipid hypothesis” as the low-fat/no-fat camp calls it, is that the research that is still used, to this very day, is scientifically invalid.

The demonization of fat started with a scientist named Ancel Keys. He was the first to discover the link between dietary fat intake and blood cholesterol. He used serum cholesterol (blood cholesterol) as his benchmark. He believed that foods that raised cholesterol in the blood caused heart disease, those that kept it the same or lowered it didn’t.

Right off the bat your “ethical science” alarm bells should be ringing.

Good science works by creating a hypothesis or theory based off of detailed observations, and then setting up a study to test whether or not said hypothesis or theory is in fact true.

Bad science is perpetrated when a pre-existing belief NOT based on observation of nature (in this case, that cholesterol causes heart disease) is tested to be true or false.

The entire foundation of the “saturated fat is bad for you” idea, Keys’ 7 Countries Study, is one giant exercise in bad science and I’m going to prove it to you.

So why did Keys pick cholesterol as his marker for heart disease? Because that was the only thing for which there was a test at the time! (Remember, science only studies what it can see and measure).

Cholesterol was known to be one of the main components in arterial plaques, so it seemed only logical that more cholesterol in the blood would cause elevated levels of heart disease. To this day however, no one has ever demonstrated how elevated blood cholesterol actually causes heart disease!

In fact, half of the people that have heart disease DON’T have high cholesterol!

AND, half of the people with high cholesterol DON’T have heart disease!

Somebody (or lots of somebodies) clearly forgot to check their facts.

Keys found that dietary fat intake exerted a large effect on blood cholesterol levels. The more fat one ate, the higher their blood cholesterol. Given that he had already decided that blood cholesterol was a risk factor for heart disease…

Voila! Dietary fat became Keys’ target throughout his long career of “fighting” heart disease.

Keys’ most famous study (the one still cited today) was called the 7 Countries Study. Keys plotted the rate of heart disease against the percentage of calories consumed as fat for Japan, Italy, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Looking at this graph you would definitely think that dietary fat intake was linked to increased heart disease risk.

What most people don’t know (and what doctors their doctors don’t tell them) is that the study actually gathered data from 22 countries.

When all the countries were added to the graph it looked like “buckshot hitting a page instead of a straight line,” in the words of one of Keys’s fellow researchers. While there is a significant relationship between fat intake and heart disease (at least as presented), the graph GREATLY over-exaggerates it’s importance. Here is the buckshot.

It looks even less convincing when you add in isolated outliers like the Masai, the Inuit, the Rendile, and the Tokelau, shown in red below (these groups really mess with Keys’ beliefs).

Here is what the “straight line” version of Keys’s graph looks like.

However, if we change his selection of countries in the data set, it appears as if fat has absolutely no relation to heart disease rates.

If we change the countries once again, we see that there is a negative correlation between fat intake and heart disease.

Hmm.

It’s beginning to appear that Keys saw what he wanted to see in his data and ignored what it was really telling him. And by displaying only 7 countries that “fit” his belief system, he greatly over-exaggerated the strength of his conclusions.

Pretty sketchy right? It gets even better.

Keys was aware that sugar consumption also correlated with the increase in heart disease – but he chalked that up to fat as well…

Keys took all the data from his study and performed what is called a multi-variate linear regression analysis (MVLRA ) on the data.

This technique is used to determine the causal relationships between multiple different factors.

When performing a MVLRA you have to run the data both ways. In the case of Keys’ Seven Countries Study that would mean holding fat constant and showing that sugar intake does NOT cause heart disease, AND holding sugar constant and showing that fat intake DOES cause heart disease.

But guess what?

He didn’t do it.

Keys only ran his numbers one way! He failed to show whether or not holding sugar constant and increasing fat would actually increase heart disease. There is a giant hole in his study!

Keys even admitted that sugar intake correlated very well with heart disease. Here is the excerpt, from page 262 of his own work.

“The fact that the incidence rate of coronary heart disease was significantly correlated with the average percentage of calories from sucrose in the diet is explained by the intercorrelation of sucrose with saturated fat.”

In other words, he chalked up the sugar correlation to donuts. Where there was fat, there was also sugar, so he decided, and yet he didn’t bother to test which one was a causal factor!

This goes back to the difference between good science and bad science. Keys had it in his mind that fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol were evil. He constructed his research and tailored his result to fit a foregone conclusion. That is bad, unethical science.

Now you’d think that whistles would be blown on this. But that didn’t happen. Instead, food processing companies saw Keys’ study as a Holy Grail, a scientific go-ahead to start modifying foods to reduce their fat content, all in the name of the greater good…and HUGE profits.

Saturated fat is NOT the cause of heart disease.

Unhealthy, toxic fats are contributors to heart disease and a whole lot of other maladies (including obesity and excess body fat in general).

 

Other Posts On Fats

The Good, The Bad, And The God-Forbid Fats: Which Fats You Should Be Eating And Why.

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