Last night, I attended a riveting talk by Sally Fallon, president and founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.
The sanctuary of the Community Church of New York was packed—a sign to me that even New Yorkers have an increased interest in the traditional diets that Price encountered on his travels around the world in the 1930's.
Tall and regal, with a mane of white hair, Fallon stepped up to the podium and began detailing the history of the lipid hypothesis, which is, of course, still accepted as the gospel Truth in the U.S. Americans ate a diet high in saturated fats in the early 20th century (to illustrate, Fallon read a list of buttery, creamy, lard-filled recipes from an 1895 cookbook published by the Baptist society of Illinois), yet the first recorded heart attack wasn't until 1921. By the time Americans had shifted their diets to include more vegetable oils and processed foods in the 1960s, 500,000 were dying of heart attack.
Two theories emerged as to why so many Americans were suddenly dying of heart disease. One was that vegetable oils, which had recently been introduced into the diet, were to blame; the other was the diet-heart theory (aka the lipid hypothesis)—that Americans were eating too much saturated fat and had high serum cholesterol levels. Despite the fact that there was little evidence for the latter (in fact, a study by Harvard pathologists Lande and Sperry of 1936 showed that there was no correlation between cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis), the lipid hypothesis was the theory that was promoted "with great vigor," according to Fallon. An organization was even founded to promote it and something called the "prudent diet": the American Heart Association.
I won't reiterate the entire sordid saga—which is full of industry pressure (Proctor & Gamble, et all), doctored study results, and plenty of medical professionals who were skeptical of the lipid hypothesis, including the American Medical Association—but I did have two "A-ha" moments. One was when Fallon told us how Mary Enig, who did her PhD thesis on trans fats at the University of Maryland, realized that most foods that contained trans fats (margarine, vegetable shortening, cookies, chips, etc.) were not labeled as such—food companies actually listed trans fats as saturated fats until the 1980's. So researchers using government databases (in particular, one called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey or NHANES II) came to the erroneous conclusion that saturated fats were causing disease—when in fact trans fats were to blame. Every epidemiological study done before 1980 (that had to do with saturated fat intake and heart disease), Fallon says, is extremely suspect.
The other was that the Framingham Heart study (one of the three studies most often cited by our government to bolster the lipid hypothesis) was presented in a misleading way. (See slide #13 on Fallon's PPT presentation.) The intervals on the bar graph start out evenly spaced (with 30 points between each cholesterol number), but the final interval is a whopping 830 points—making the increase in heart disease at the upper-end of the cholesterol spectrum appear drastic. Fallon showed us what the heart disease line would look like if the intervals were evenly spaced, with 30 points between cholesterol numbers: it's almost horizontal. The upshot: if your cholesterol level is 1000 (a very rare condition) you have a slightly increased risk of heart disease.
I'm going to stop there, because I hope to write more about this controversial subject in the future. But for those who are interested, here's a link to "The Oiling of America" talk on DVD and an article version is on the Weston A. Price site.
Comments