Fat: To eat, or not to eat.

December 17th, 2009, by Bill

THINCS

The one thing I question. It lists fatty meats as foods to avoid. Such as T-bone, ground beef, bacon etc. Convince me these are ok in the paleo diet, especially the grass fed variety? Love me some good t-bone so I really want to be convinced.

Heath, as well as many others, asked the above question after picking up a copy of The Paleo Diet for Athletes. This is one of the reasons why I no longer recommend that anyone read The Paleo Diet or any of Dr. Cordain's other books. Instead, I now point people to The Primal Blueprint, Trick And Treat, or Good Calories, Bad Calories when beginning this way of eating.

Getting back to the original question, the reason you are continuously told to avoid red meat and its fat is because of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis which gained popularity in the 1950s thanks to Dr. Ancel Keys. It was hypothesized that eating saturated fats (i.e. red meat) would increase one's total and LDL cholesterols and in turn increase one's chances of heart disease. This is simply untrue.

The problem is that over the course of a few decades the Diet-Heart hypothesis became accepted as fact without the proper science to back it up. The scientific method was completely ignored and fraudulent practices reigned supreme. If you are wondering 'why' or 'how' this would happen, hang around and we'll hit on that again in the near future. For now, just know that it probably had something to do with money.

What I'm trying to say is that you should stop fearing red meat and high cholesterol. If you want to be healthy and disease free, ditch the grains and sugars while embracing red meat and it's high levels of saturated fat. Let the uninformed masses continue to pay a premium for the low-fat meats and be thankful that we don't have to pay as much for the life promoting cuts :)

Here are Dr. Uffe Ravnskov's 8 facts on cholesterol:

  1. Cholesterol is not a deadly poison, but a substance vital to the cells of all mammals. There are no such things as good or bad cholesterol, but mental stress, physical activity and change of body weight may influence the level of blood cholesterol. A high cholesterol is not dangerous by itself, but may reflect an unhealthy condition, or it may be totally innocent.
  2. A high blood cholesterol is said to promote atherosclerosis and thus also coronary heart disease. But many studies have shown that people whose blood cholesterol is low become just as atherosclerotic as people whose cholesterol is high.
  3. Your body produces three to four times more cholesterol than you eat. The production of cholesterol increases when you eat little cholesterol and decreases when you eat much. This explains why the ”prudent” diet cannot lower cholesterol more than on average a few per cent.
  4. There is no evidence that too much animal fat and cholesterol in the diet promotes atherosclerosis or heart attacks. For instance, more than twenty studies have shown that people who have had a heart attack haven't eaten more fat of any kind than other people, and degree of atherosclerosis at autopsy is unrelated with the diet.
  5. The only effective way to lower cholesterol is with drugs, but neither heart mortality or total mortality have been improved with drugs the effect of which is cholesterol-lowering only. On the contrary, these drugs are dangerous to your health and may shorten your life.
  6. The new cholesterol-lowering drugs, the statins, do prevent cardio-vascular disease, but this is due to other mechanisms than cholesterol-lowering. Unfortunately, they also stimulate cancer in rodents, disturb the functions of the muscles, the heart and the brain and pregnant women taking statins may give birth to children with malformations more severe than those seen after thalidomide.
  7. Many of these facts have been presented in scientific journals and books for decades but are rarely told to the public by the proponents of the diet-heart idea.
  8. The reason why laymen, doctors and most scientists have been misled is because opposing and disagreeing results are systematically ignored or misquoted in the scientific press.

Here are several other sources that address this very topic:

Whole Health Source
Manninen Nutraceuticals: Finland's Authority on Human Performance
The Cholesterol Myths
New cholesterol guidelines for converting healthy people into patients
THINCS: The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics

Category: Nutrition

7 Responses to "Fat: To eat, or not to eat."

  • Mark R.
    December 21, 2009, 8:59 am

    Bill love this post, not to open another can of worms but this whole debate or lack thereof is so similar to what's happening in the world of 'global climate change' that it's scary, and what I mean by that is that politics begins to influence science and all dissenters are just ignorant wackos, and before you know it anyone consuming high amounts of red meat is at high risk for heart disease, similar to me exhaling CO2 right now being a major cause of global warming, which we all know is decimating the polar bear population. It's amazing how quickly money corrupts legitimate research and proper science. I don't know if you've heard any of the saber rattling that's been going on around capital hill the last few years about health tax credits, of course those will all be based on ideas like the diet-heart hypothesis, so those who have 'healthy' diets according to the government will benefit, while us crazies will be subjected to ridicule or worse case scenario tax penalties that will hope to incentivize us to chuck the read meat and bacon for a bowl of cereal and a loaf of bread.

  • DEB
    December 21, 2009, 12:09 pm

    Bill, would love to have a short paleo diet intro seminar. Maybe we could post something on the board to see if any others new to the Fort are interested.

  • Mark R.
    December 22, 2009, 8:32 am

    Brian:

    I love polar bears...did you know that they are the only species of bear that will actually track humans for food, don't know if Bill would approve as most of us are grain fed these days, that's probably hurting them a lot more than the myth of man-made warming.

  • Brad Gross
    January 6, 2010, 4:56 pm

    I think the key thing that always gets overlooked in research concerning lipids and cholesterol is the idea of the biochemical mechanism in our bodies to burn and handle fat & cholesterol. Our bodies lean towards burning fat as it's a more efficient energy source, but the good old FDA tells everyone, "hey, you need 400 grams of carbs a day" and then everything in the world is HFCS based and full of grain by products and then people eat it and the body says, "Well, I'll take some of it and burn it, the rest I will store and never use" etc.

    As the body moves back to its natural fat-burning tendencies, we see the body handling cholesterol in a completely different way. It drives me mad when I hear these whole-grain whackjobs telling me how depriving my body of fat will be so good, but in order to sustain life while eating low fat, I need to pump it full of ACE inhibitors and Cholesterol Statins....which then can escalate your chances of Type 1 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

    Jimmy Moore has a great podcast interview with Dr. Duane Graveline about cholesterol, great podcast you can find here: http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/?p=6550

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