SATURATED FATS, GOOD; TRANS-FATS, BAD

from Dr. Mercola . . . 

 

Trans Fats Are Being Replaced with Equally Worrisome Oil Products

The latest issue of Wise Traditions, the Weston Price journal, has a great article that is an excerpt from her book, in which she discusses this topic. Most of you reading this are now well aware of the dangers of trans fats, and that the FDA is in the process of banning them completely. That's great news, but the question is, what is trans fat being replaced with? The answer is that the oils they're currently using in lieu of trans fats create toxic oxidation products, which in fact may be more toxic than trans fat.

"I stumbled on this topic because a vice president of Loders Croklaan, a big fats and oils producer, said to me, 'I just heard this terrifying talk by a man in a company who does all the cleaning for fast food restaurants.'... He said they have been having problems since restaurants started getting rid of trans fats in their fryers around 2007... The new oils were building up gunk in the drains and on the walls.

This kind of gunk would harden, and workers would scrape for days and not be able to get it off. The conventional cleaners didn't work anymore. It's turning out to be these highly volatile airborne chemicals. When the restaurants' uniforms would be cleaned, the chemicals were so volatile that they would have problems of piles of uniforms spontaneously combusting in the back of trucks. And then they would go to the dryers. The heat of the dryers, even after the restaurant uniforms were cleaned, would cause fires." [Emphasis mine]

The cleaning company ended up producing a more potent chemical cleaner to scrub off the polymers off the walls and uniforms. Unfortunately, the nutrition community is not studying these volatile vegetable oils. Others, primarily in the molecular biology and genetics fields are, but the different fields are not communicating with each other.

Even Low Levels of Aldehydes Cause Massive Inflammation

One group in Taiwan is studying this issue because women have much higher rates of lung cancer than men. They think it may be related to the fact that women, particularly in Asian countries, stir-fry in unventilated spaces using vegetable oils. In Norway, there's another research group trying to assess the effects on worker health in restaurants.

"[These volatile compounds] are very hard to study because they are very ephemeral, literally changing from one second to the next...They’re very unstable. They’re hard to isolate,” Nina explains. “One thing they did was simply to show that these products exist.  There’s a whole category called aldehydes, which are particularly worrisome.

A group doing research on animals have found that at fairly low levels of exposure, these aldehydes in animals caused tremendous inflammation, which is related to heart disease. They oxidized LDL cholesterol, which is thought to be the LDL cholesterol that becomes dangerous. There's a link to heart disease. There's also some evidence that links these aldehydes in particular to Alzheimer's. They seem to have a very severe effect on the body."

One researcher has found that aldehydes cause toxic shock in animals through gastric damage. We now know a lot more about the role your gut plays in your health, and the idea that aldehydes from heated vegetable oils can damage your gastric system is frighteningly consistent with the rise we see in immune problems and gastrointestinal-related diseases.

"When the FDA got rid of trans fats... restaurants began to use these regular liquid oils instead... they were the cheapest possible option to use… The FDA really did not consider any of this literature about these oxidation products. When you implement a law, you're supposed to look at the risks. What will happen if you implement a new regulation? In this case, the FDA did not," Nina says.

In hearing this, it appears as though cooking with vegetable oil could be a "new" occupational hazard (having occurred within the last 10 years or so) for restaurant workers. If vegetable oils volatize and gum up into polymers that are nearly impossible to clean, and that are damaging fryers, equipment, and causing uniforms to spontaneously combust, what is it doing to the workers' lungs? Larger fast food chains are aware of this issue, and have implemented a number of fixes to address it. But smaller restaurants may be unaware of this problem, thereby placing workers at potential risk. The same applies if you're regularly cooking with vegetable oils in your home.

Saturated Fats Are Stable, and Therefore Ideal for Cooking

Tallow is a hard fat that comes from cows. Lard is a hard fat that comes from pigs. They're both animal fats, and used to be the main fats used in cooking. One of their benefits is that, since they're saturated fats, they do not oxidize when heated. And saturated fats do not have double bonds that can react with oxygen; therefore they cannot form dangerous aldehydes or other toxic oxidation products.

Sheep tallow soap.

 "They're solids at room temperature. That's why they make great cooking fats and have always made great cooking fats. But we don't think about that. This whole chain of events has happened because we demonized saturated fats," Nina notes.

Fortunately, we're now seeing cracks in the prevailing dogma about saturated fats. In March of this year, a groundbreaking meta-analysis reviewed the clinical trial evidence and the epidemiological evidence, and came to the conclusion that saturated fats really cannot be said to cause heart disease. Another meta-analysis three years earlier came to the same conclusion.

Saturated Fat—It Does a Body Good...

The benefits of saturated fat are many. Some appear to be uniquely traceable to saturated fat. For example, you need saturated fats for brain and immune system health. Another argument is that animal foods in general, including meat cheese, butter, dairy, and eggs, contain high amounts of vitamins. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, and you have to have the fat that comes naturally in animal foods along with the vitamins in order to absorb those vitamins.

"If you're drinking skim milk, you don't have the fat you need to absorb the vitamins in milk. Without absorbing the vitamins, you can't absorb the minerals. These are uniquely nutrient-dense foods. Vitamin B6 and B12, you can't get in plant foods. They're really nutrient-dense foods that come packaged in the fat that you need to absorb them, along with protein. They're kind of a perfect package of nutrient-dense food," Nina says.

Nina also points out that many clinical trials over the past decade have clearly showed that a diet higher in fat and restricted in carbohydrate results in health improvements such as weight loss and a reduction in risk factors for diabetes, and heart disease. A high-fat diet typically means eating animal foods. Of course, there are very healthy saturated plant fats as well—coconut oil and palm oil, specifically. (Avocado, another healthy fat, is unsaturated.)

"[Coconut and palm oil] have been used for millennia in Asian cultures. They are making a big comeback in part because vegans who don't want to eat animal products have found that they still need a fat for cooking that doesn't oxidize when it's heated... Coconut oil fills that function. In the food industry, they've started to bring back palm oil, which has a lot of saturated fat in it and is a good way to make food that lasts long on a shelf, because again, saturated fats are more stable and long-lasting."

Healthy Eating Guidelines for the 21st Century

So, what's the general 21st century revised rule for healthy living and eating? One of the most important points is that you do not need to avoid saturated fats. Saturated fats were unfairly condemned in the 1950s based on very primitive evidence that has since been re-analyzed. The evidence now clearly shows that saturated fats do not cause heart disease. Moreover, your body needs saturated fats for proper function of your:

Cell Membranes	Heart	Bones to absorb calcium
Liver	Lungs	Hormones
Immune system	Satiety to reduce hunger	Genetic regulation

 "Another key piece of information is that a high-fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet looks healthier for losing weight, and making your heart disease biomarkers and diabetes biomarkers look better. There's a real range in how much carbohydrates people will tolerate," Nina says. 

Many people need to increase the healthful fat in their diet to 50-85 percent of daily calories. This includes not only saturated fat but also monounsaturated fats (from avocados and nuts) and omega-3 fats. When it comes to cooking fats, few compare to tallow and lard in terms of health benefits and safety. These are the cooking fats that were originally used, and they're excellent frying fats. To learn more, I highly recommend reading Nina's book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, which contains nine years' worth of research.

CAREFUL WITH OILS AND THEIR PROMISES

I have recommended olive oil as a healthful source of anti-oxidants, and to be sure it does have anti-oxidant abilities.  This is not an anecdotal report, but the antioxidant content of olive oil is measurable.  It is measured in ORAC, Oxygenated Radical Absorbancy Capacity.  The first person I ever heard report on ORAC values or the ORAC values of olive oil was Dr. Barry Sears, author and owner of the Zone Diet.  He claimed that extra virgin olive oil had 30,000 ORAC value.  Now I do not know in what form that olive oil measured such a high ORAC value, but checking the online database for ORAC values at phytochemicals.info, olive oil has a much smaller ORAC value than what Dr. Sears reported.  According to the phytochemicals.info site, olive oil has an ORAC value of 766 when prepared at home and with parsley.  When prepared at home and with basil, olive oil has an ORAC value of 684.  So I would love to know where he discovered that fact, if it is a fact, that olive oil has the highest ORAC value of any fruit or food.

"SUPPLEMENTING WITH SELENIUM, YOU CAN REDUCE CANCER BY 69%, BREAST CANCER BY 82%"

The benefits of selenium start at the 12:45 mark with Dr. Schrauzer.

One report that Dr. Wallach mentions is the Flexner Report. What this report did was set standards by which medical schools and practicing doctors adhered to. If they didn't, then that school was forced to close and or was incorporated by another school as a department or a wing. 

Dr. Wallach also mentions and explains epigenetics, which according to Wikipedia ". . . is the study of changes in gene expression caused by certain base pairs in DNA or RNA being "turned off" or "turned on" again through chemical reaction."  Wallach argues that no disease is caused by genetics but rather by nutritional deficiencies.  He argues that it is impossible to be healthy on an adequate diet alone.   Therefore, according to Wallach, people need supplements.  His rationale for this claim?  He points to Thomas Edison's discovery of electricity and how that replaced wood as the source of fuel that had been around for thousands and thousands of years.  Once we went to electricity, we lost all the minerals that come with and from wood ash, dead wood, that crops used to soak up through their roots.  Then he points to the damming up of rivers.  Floods would leave silt that farmers would use that came from hundreds of miles away. Death and disease are quite expensive.  Much better to use supplements than to do surgery.  Those complaining about supplements are doctors and their industry.  

WHAT ARE THE TOP 10 VITAMINS THAT PEOPLE NEED?

Wallach would not identify these.  He could not reduce adequate nutritional support down to ten.  What he did offer was an outline of the number of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and essential acids needed for optimal health.  Here is what he listed:

60 minerals

16 vitamins

12 amino acids

3 essential acids

A total of 90 nutrients.

Calcium deficiency alone, he claims, gives us 147 diseases.  Wow!

HISTORY OF SCURVY

Two million British and Japanese soldiers died.  They didn't have cabbage or fresh fruit to eat.  They ate pork.  After 90 days at sea, they were getting sick, with poor teeth, diarrhea, etc.  Scurvy plagued navies for several hundred years.

Failed medical theory that said that germs would 4 humors are out of balance. 

. . . discovered germ theory.  Beriberi.

200mcg of Selenium

Supplementing with selenium, you can reduce prostate cancer by 69%, breast cancer by 82%, and other cancers by 462% by cooking meat less.  Jackson, Mississippi has the highest cancer rate because they fry a lot of their foods.  Rare earth elements are trace, trace, trace minerals.  Essential for maximizing DNA and gene health.  

RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS

Rheumatoid arthritis is two parts.  A combination of a bug, called mycoplasma, and a nutritional deficiency.  Just as you can kill syphilis, "a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium," in two weeks with penicillin, you can kill mycoplasma bacteria with minocycline, one of a series of tetracycline antibiotics.  But then you have to repair the damage produced by that bacteria using Healthy Bone & Joint Pack, which has all 90 essential nutrients plus secret sauce of supporting and promoting nature's repair of cartilage and ligaments, tendons, connective tissues joint capsules, discs between the vertebrae.  Gold shots only relieve symptoms, pain, and inflammation.  These don't kill the germ that causes arthritis and the result is that years later people need a joint replacement.  The medical industry can kill, infect, and injure people and still be in business.  

WHAT ABOUT EXERCISE?

How important is exercise?  Wow!!  Dr. Wallach's answer--take the 90 essential nutrients.  He calls exercise a fatal disease.  He points to professional sports.  Says that the average life span of professional athletes is 62; for football players, it's 51.  No professional athlete lived to be 100.  AMA claimed that while running a man's chance of a mortal heart attack increases by 700% percent.  So, he argues, why would anybody want to run?  Says that you need to replace fluids.  Says that sweat is not water but a soup of everything floating around in your blood.  He makes a sports drink that has 100 nutrients, whereas commercial drinks have 2 to 4 nutrients.  Water alone will rehydrate you.  Muscle cramps, muscle tears.  Sudden heart death is caused by a mineral deficiency of selenium.  Ruptured aneurysms are caused by a deficiency of copper.  Most sports drinks have only sodium and chloride, i.e., salt.

WHAT ABOUT CHILDREN?

Gummy vitamins.  How much does a growing child need?  They need more than a grown adult who is "maintaining" ourselves.  We want to maximize our potential for longevity and health.  Per pound of body weight, kids need more nutrients than adults do.  Food Chemistry Journals, baby formulas contain less than 25% of daily requirements.  And here he again points to the lack of wood ash and to the reduction in mineral-rich silt caused by damming up of rivers that remove floods and the beneficial minerals from rocks, streams, and lakes hundreds of miles away from cities and towns up in the mountains.

WHAT ARE THE LEADING CAUSES OF THE HEALTHCARE CRISIS IN THE U.S.?

Main cause is due to monopoly.  Self-pleasing.  Rendered competition as quacks.  The insurance industry only pays them.  Any industry that can kill, injure, and poison its customers and still be in business month after month, year after year is an amazing industry.  They infect 2 million people in hospitals alone, of which 90,000 die.  There's no competition.  That's the main problem: no competition.  If countries were to do this to other nations, it would be an act of war.  

TAKE AWAY?

Supplement with 90 essential vitamins and do this religiously.  So his 90 essential vitamins come in a liquid form, which makes it very easy to overdose.  If a capful or a tablespoon is required and the drink is flavored and tasty, besides good sense and prudence what is to stop people from overdosing?  That is my one caveat.  As a disclaimer, I have never tried Dr. Wallach's product, not a one.  For this reason alone, I cannot recommend them.  From a logical standpoint, I see no reason why his vitamins would not benefit people as a maintenance protocol.

OBAMACARE?

Problematic because it relies on a failed premise that the reason why America is sick is because Americans don't have access to doctors.