Saturated with Lies: The Truth about Fat

Most of what you’ve been told about fat has nothing to do with your well-being… and everything to do with one man’s ego. It’s time to clear up the lies you’ve been told and give you the facts. Your health depends on it.
Fat is a dangerous subject.

BUT it’s time to bust the myths surrounding fat… and that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now.

You are likely ruining your own health at the moment because you don’t fully understand fat… like countless others have.

Many have even died from this misunderstanding, which began more than half a century ago… when fat started being blamed for heart disease.

The whole thing stemmed from bad nutritional information that ultimately made its way all around the globe… and it was all based on a questionnaire filled out by 31 men in rural Crete.^1,2

That’s it. Thirty-one men were asked about what they remembered eating the day before.

And, as you’ll learn in a minute, that 31-person, all-male dietary questionnaire is the foundation upon which we’ve largely built 50+ years of diet recommendations.

Well, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. are now hitting all-time highs.^3,4,5,6

In other words, despite being increasingly diet-conscious, we keep getting fatter and sicker.

And I’m going to show you exactly what that is, and why we believed the flawed science behind it — which demonized eating fat — for so long.

I’m also going to get down and dirty about different types of fat: which ones are good, and which ones are bad.

I’m even going to tell you about fats you’d never expect to be good for you, such as certain healthy saturated fats… and yes, even one type of healthy trans fat.

So, pay attention… because we’re about to clear a few extremely important things up.

ONE SCIENTIST’S PRIDE = DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES

Ancel-Keys — Ancel Keys was determined to prove fat caused heart disease…whether it was true or not.

In the early 1950s, scientists were becoming increasingly alarmed by what seemed to be an epidemic of heart disease in the United States.⁹

People everywhere were dropping dead younger and younger of heart attacks, and nobody knew why.¹⁰

And this escalating panic reached a fever pitch on September 24, 1955, when U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while in office.¹¹

On the momentum of the resulting panic, it wasn’t hard for an ambitious physiologist named Ancel Keys to secure funding for his own international heart study in 1956.¹²

You see, based on some passing observations he made while living in Europe several years earlier, Keys had formed a hypothesis that eating saturated fat caused heart disease…^13,14

…a hypothesis which was coldly dismissed when he presented it before the World Health Organization’s panel on atherosclerosis in 1955.¹⁵

After this blowoff, Keys — a famously headstrong man^16,17 — was determined to prove himself right.¹⁸

So, he built up publicity for himself by confidently announcing in twenty different papers that dietary fat intake was connected to blood cholesterol levels and heart disease, despite questionable evidence…¹⁹

…and he had all of these papers published in leading scientific journals from 1957 to 1958.²⁰

Riding the wave of this self-generated publicity combined with the heart attack scare, Keys commenced his international study — now known as the Seven Countries Study — in 1958.^21,22

And from the moment this study began, dark things were on the horizon.

Nutrition data were available for 22 countries at that time…^23,24 So, why would Keys only report on seven of them?

Well, many of Keys’ contemporaries believe he deliberately picked the countries that supported his theories about fat and left out the ones that didn’t. This is known in the scientific community as “cherry-picking.” ^25,26,27

This might explain why he left out France, which had low rates of heart disease despite a high-saturated-fat diet — a phenomenon that later became known as the “French Paradox.” ²⁸

And then, there is the matter of Keys’ data itself. You see, aside from cherry-picking his data, Keys did two other major things wrong…

First, he only pointed out correlations. Correlation means two things simply coincide. It doesn’t mean one caused the other.

For example, everyone who eats apples also eventually dies. There is a 100% correlation between eating apples and death. That doesn’t mean eating apples causes death.

Similarly, when Keys points out that people had long life and low rates of heart attacks in Crete and they also didn’t eat much saturated fat…²⁹ that doesn’t mean they had low heart disease because they didn’t eat much saturated fat.

If he hadn’t cherry-picked his data, this might have been more obvious within the study.

You see, of the 300 men originally medically examined for the Crete section of the study, only 31 were actually surveyed about their diets.³⁰

And the original surveys about what those men remembered eating over the previous seven days were unavailable for the study… So, Keys substituted in data from a previous questionnaire.³¹

There was also a lack of data on fruit and vegetable consumption for those 31 men. So, Keys used data on the availability of fruits and vegetables in Greece over the previous 4 years to guess what these men had eaten.³²

And then he suggested that the resulting imaginary diet — later called the “Mediterranean Diet” ^33,34 — was the reason for the long lives and low levels of heart disease observed in these men.³⁵

Oh… and by the way… amidst the publicity of conducting this “groundbreaking study,” Keys landed on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1961.^36,37

AND he got a book deal and hit the New York Times Bestsellers list:^38,39,40,41

So, naturally, Keys was under a white-hot spotlight, and any conclusions he drew were going to be publicized everywhere.

And when he concluded that the low-saturated-fat “Mediterranean Diet” was ideal for heart health, people everywhere began adopting it.

You see, even Keys was mindful enough to point the finger at a specific type of fat (saturated). However, when a few scientists came out later thinking that fat might be a cancer cause…⁴²

With the low-fat craze now at full force, people were left largely with carbs as their alternative major calorie source.

And by the way… the grain industry, in particular, didn’t mind any of this one bit.

You see, they’d already applied pressure to the USDA to make grains the largest recommended food group at the bottom of the Food Guide Pyramid, which the government was designing at the time to teach the public how to eat:⁴³

And when the Food Guide Pyramid came out in 1992, right in the middle of the low-fat craze, everything lined up perfectly. People were left to wolf down the carbs for the next 20+ years.

Early in the 20th century leading up to the 1950s heart disease crisis, three key things happened:

The issue with sugar is particularly interesting…

Dr John Yudkin You see, as far back as the 1950s, well-known scientists had contradicted Keys’ fat-heart disease hypothesis… by pointing the finger at sugar instead.

One particularly notable proponent of the sugar theory was respected British physiologist and researcher Dr. John Yudkin.^49,50,51

As early as 1957, when Keys was still preparing for the Seven Countries Study, Yudkin published a study analyzing 41 countries (not 7!) and correlating heart disease to sugar, not fat.⁵²

He published another study in 1964 furthering this theory,⁵³ and in 1972, he released a book thoroughly exploring the dangers of sugar called Pure White and Deadly: The Problem of Sugar. In this book, Yudkin backed his sugar hypothesis up with a substantial amount of research.⁵⁴

And Yudkin was not alone in his sugar suspicions. Nobel Prize^®⁵⁵ winner Dr. Linus Pauling publicly agreed with Yudkin about sugar shortly after Pure White and Deadly was released.⁵⁶

And more recently, University of California San Francisco endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig gave a famous sugar lecture citing Yudkin that was posted online and went viral.^57,58,59

Unfortunately, Keys and several other powerful figures who were invested in the low-fat trend retaliated against Yudkin in a shockingly brutal way…⁶⁰

And that’s a story I’ll get to in the next Food Truth Letter post… coming out soon. Right now, we need to get back to the fat!

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To quote the esteemed Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of the Harvard School of Public health…

“Diets high in fat do not appear to to be the primary cause of the high prevalence of excess body fat in our society, and reductions in fat will not be a solution.”
– Dr. Walter Willett, December 2002 ⁶¹

Now, there are some saturated fat sources you should honestly avoid for better health.

These mainly include fats from grain-fed, unhealthy, factory-farmed animals. Milk, meat, eggs, and fish are all problematic for your health when it comes to factory-farmed sources.^62,63

This is due to the grain feed, harsh and dirty conditions, antibiotics and hormones, and diseases the animals are exposed to. These conditions also affect their omega-3 balance…^64,65 which I’ll get to in a minute.

Now… if you get your saturated fats from good sources, such as grass-fed meat and dairy and cold-pressed coconut oil, they do some very important things in your body.

The list goes on and on. In other words, saturated fats are crucial to your health, and cutting them out is a big mistake.

Again, though, the health benefits of saturated fat — or any other fat — are greatly affected by what you are consuming to get the fats… which is why I’m providing very specific examples.

This fat is found in avocados, nuts, seeds, olives, olive oil (use extra virgin, cold-pressed), and lard and tallow (grass-fed, pasture-raised).

It’s widely (and rightfully) accepted as extremely beneficial to the body,⁷⁷ promoting weight loss, cardiovascular health, healthy cholesterol levels, lower diabetes risk, and lower breast cancer risk.^78,79

There is, however, one monounsaturated fat source you should avoid: canola oil.

Despite historically being marketed as healthy, canola oil is riddled with chemical additives like bleach, deodorizers, and degummers. Not to mention, it’s processed at extreme temperatures that essentially ruin any nutritional value it might have had.⁸⁰

So, skip the canola and spring for the coconut! (Or any of the natural sources I mentioned above.)

You may have heard of the two main polyunsaturated fats: omega-3 and omega-6.

They are both crucial in your diet because your body can’t function without them and yet it doesn’t produce either one of them on its own.⁸¹

Omega-3 fats are essential to nervous system function and endocrine function (particularly your body’s ability to regulate insulin). In fact, the very structure of the cells you’re made of depends on omega-3! ⁸²

Omega-6 fats are crucial to cellular function, but without the proper balance of omega-3, they can start doing some terrible things inside you right away.⁸³

Weight gain that you can’t stop, immune system malfunction, rampant inflammation, heart disease, and cancer are just a few of the things a poor omega-3 to omega-6 balance can easily churn up inside your body.⁸⁴

Good polyunsaturated fat sources that help you achieve a proper balance of omega-3 to omega-6 include wild-caught cold-water fish, pasture-raised meat and eggs, whole nuts and seeds, flax seed oil, and hemp seed oil.^87,88

Fat sources with poor omega balances you should avoid are refined oils, such as soybean oil, cottonseed oil, vegetable oil, and corn oil.⁸⁹

Also, polyunsaturated fats do NOT perform well as cooking oils.^90,91 For cooking, use lard, tallow, avocado oil, olive oil, or coconut oil (olive oil and coconut oil at medium heat or lower).

Alright… we’ve now reached the big, bad wolf of fats. This one has been demonized, as it very well should. It’s one of the worst things you can consume.

Keep in mind, there is one good trans fat, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, though, let’s deal with the bad stuff.

Trans fats are the hallmark of hydrogenated oils. Hydrogenation is the industrial process used to make vegetable oils more solid and stable for shipping, resulting in products like Crisco^®⁹² and margarine.

In addition to very easily making you fat, trans fat has been linked by a MOUNTAIN of evidence to not only obesity… but deaths from heart disease, colon cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes.^{93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102}

And beware: Even though the government is cracking down on trans fat, manufacturers are definitely still finding loopholes to sneak it into your food without having to label it.¹⁰³

Now, all that being said… there’s one trans fat that’s actually healthy, and it’s called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).

CLA, because of its molecular makeup, is technically a trans fat… but it isn’t produced in a factory via hydrogenation. CLA occurs naturally in grass-fed butter and beef. (Notice a recurring food theme here?)

CLA has been shown to aid in weight loss, not to mention protect you against the development of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.^104,105,106

Fat isn’t evil, and cutting it out of your diet is just about the worst thing you can do for weight loss or your health.

The real problem here is sugar, and it goes far beyond what you’ve likely ever imagined… and that’s exactly what I’m going to cover in the next letter.

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