How to Live to be 100
The "Skinny" on the Fat in your Diet
As promised, we now begin a series on fat. We should really use the term "lipids." In the past, fat has been used to specify the lipids that were " hard" at room temperature, and oils were lipids that were liquid at room temperature. It is easier just to call it all fat. And remember, fat by any other name is still fat!
Triglyceride is another name for fat. A triglyceride has a three carbon alcohol called "glycerol" hooked up to three things called "fatty acids." The fatty acids are either saturated or unsaturated. Most animal fats are saturated. These tend to increase the amount of cholesterol in our blood. Saturated fat is true fat--solid at room temperature. The unsaturated fat, for the most part, is liquid at room temperature, and as such is an "oil."
Many years ago a Frenchman figured out a way to bubble hydrogen gas through vegetable oil to make "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil." This would be solid at room temperature. This allowed a cheaper way to produce a fat that would have "superior" cooking and baking properties. Hence, butter was replaced by margarine.
Margarine was going to solve all of our problems. It was inexpensive, and it was known to lower cholesterol--the "definitive" cause of heart disease. However, it is not turning out that way. When I started medical school at Tulane University in 1979 my cholesterol was 200. That was the low end of "normal." The high end of normal was 300. Now, thanks to a vegetarian diet, my cholesterol level is 150. And thanks to margarine the top of the "normal" range for cholesterol is now 200 rather than 300. We have cut our cholesterol levels drastically, but the rate of heart disease has not seemed to slow down. We have stopped smoking. We have bought jogging suits and work-out tapes. We have cut back on everything, but one item--PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL.
Our heart specialists told us we could not lower our cholesterol by more than 10% with diet. I lowered mine by 25%. They told us it was total cholesterol that mattered. They told us to eat margarine. Then they told us it was the LDL. They also told us to drink alcohol to raise our HDL--a lot of us liked that (a little is good and a lot is better!) Now they say it is not the total LDL that is bad, but it is the particle size. If you ever read the book Catch-22, you would recall when they showed the reconnaissance photos showing how far they had missed their targets and the officers would say "but the bomb patterns were perfect." Our pharmaceutical friends have been describing the bomb patterns their drugs make. And I must admit, the statin drugs do send up quite a mushroom cloud! But you can't depend on those drugs to make you live to be a hundred. If you want to live to be a hundred, you have to eat right.
Now, let's examine what the definitive textbook on health has to say about fat. Leviticus 7:23 says, "Speak to the Israelites telling them not to eat any of the fat of cattle, sheep or goats." There must be a reason that God did not want us eating animal fat. Over and over again, olive oil is talked about in a good light. But the animal fat was to be burned on the altar giving a sweet aroma for the Lord.
In the nineteenth century, we learned how to turn vegetable oil into an animal fat substitute--we made margarine. This is in direct conflict with the Levitican dietary law. We tried to "patent" around God's dietary law. But God noted in Leviticus 3:17 that it would be a "perpetual statute."
Angina pectorus has only been described in the English medical literature for 200 years. In 200 years, we have changed our diets and our lifestyle so much that we have caused an epidemic of cancer, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Two hundred years before, none of the diseases existed in any appreciable numbers--and yet we are told that these diseases are "genetic." Did we all mutate? No. We changed our diets.
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