Death By Supermarket (14 page)

The long and the short of it was that the primitive people who ate historically indigenous diets almost always had all thirty-two, perfectly aligned teeth, and cavities were a rarity. The photographs of these native people show smiles out of
People
magazine. They were attractive, cheerful, robust, fertile, and free from mental, dental, and degenerative diseases. The photographs of native people who ventured out to live on white man’s food—sugar, flour, pasteurized milk, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and other factory foods—were more reminiscent of the backwoods folks in the
1972 movie
Deliverance
. Without exception, primitive people who became civilized in their eating habits developed infertility problems and suffered with gnarly, rotten teeth, and rank gums, as well as infectious, mental, and degenerative diseases and obesity.

The diets that promoted robust health consisted primarily of foods that are forbidden by our modern medical establishment: fat, fat, and more fat, from the organ meat of wild or grass-fed domesticated animals, to insects (including such savory treats as fly and ant eggs), birds, sea mammals, guinea pigs, bears and hogs, the egg yolks of various birds, whole raw milk, cheese, butter, and other dairy products, as well as the more conventionally acceptable fish, shellfish, fish organs, fish liver oils, and fish eggs.

Price shipped twenty thousand food samples back to America for analysis, including deep yellow butter—a product of grass-eating cows—that was a prized food of many of the cultures studied. When Price analyzed the butter, he found it to be exceptionally high in fat-soluble vitamins, particularly vitamins A and D. (Without these fat-soluble vitamins, humans cannot properly utilize minerals or absorb water-soluble vitamins.) From grass-fed dairy products, fatty organ meats, and some seafood, Price also isolated another biochemical catalyst for the absorption and utilization of minerals—which was also an immune system enhancer—a substance that he dubbed with the Flash Gordonish name ActivatorX, which has subsequently been identified as containing vitamin K. In addition, his research determined that the savages consumed four times the minerals and water-soluble vitamins and about ten times the fat-soluble vitamins that Americans were eating at that time (roughly seventy years ago).

Francis Pottenger, M.D., had just finished his residency at L.A. County Hospital in 1930, the year before Weston and Florence Price set out on their journey. During the years the Prices trekked the globe, Pottenger engaged in parallel research and became known for his research on more than 900 cats, which he conducted between 1932 and 1942.

Pottenger compared the effects of two diets on cats. Cats that were fed diets of raw milk and raw meat had shiny, petable fur, sound bones, and good teeth, and were parasite free, healthy, fertile, and loveable. The cats
that were fed cooked meat and pasteurized milk gave birth to weak, puny kittens. These cats were riddled with fleas, ticks, intestinal parasites, skin diseases, and allergies. The females were she-devils, the males meek and cringing. They had terrible bone structure, and in fact, Pottenger observed the same types of facial and dental degeneration in his cats that Price found in his civilized native people.
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Pottenger maintained, like Price, that where there is smoke there is fire. In other words, terrible bone structure and messed-up teeth indicate poor nutrition, just as sound bone structure and pearly whites indicate healthy nutrition. (This is not to say that, in this book, we’re headed toward gnawing on raw meat, but only to point out that both Price’s and Pottenger’s research demonstrate that nutrient-dead foods—i.e., civilized diets—produce poor health, while untampered-with, real, living food produces robust health.) However, because of the prior rejection of nutrition as standard of care, neither Price’s nor Pottenger’s research made a lasting impression on the medical community. On the contrary, events unfolded within the American population that spurred the medical community in the opposite direction, so that dairy and meat would be vilified and factory fats that were made in laboratories would be glorified as health-giving.

From 1900 to the end of World War II, the rise in myocardial infarction brought the medical community together in an attempt to figure out the cause. Atherosclerosis is the stiffening of the coronary arteries combined with plaque, which is a coating on the artery walls. In some people with advanced atherosclerosis, arterial plaque becomes so thick and protruding that it blocks off the blood and accompanying oxygen supply to the heart, thus causing radiating discomfort called angina. If blood and oxygen flow to part of the heart is completely blocked, the part of the heart that is affected will die. This condition is known as myocardial infarction or a heart attack.

Today 2,500 Americans die of cardiovascular disease every day, an average of one death every thirty-four seconds.
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Each year ten million Americans are disabled by cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease,
stroke, and disorders of the circulatory system. Children now suffer from heart disease, a degenerative condition formerly related to aging.

Prior to 1900, when Americans ate butter, cheese, whole milk, red meat, beef and lamb tallow, chicken fat, and lard, heart disease caused only 9 percent of all deaths. Today heart disease causes 30.3 percent of deaths. The first reported incidence of myocardial infarction didn’t occur until 1926. By then Americans’ diets were changing rapidly, with factory foods infiltrating our food chain. But our medical community didn’t use research like Price’s and Pottenger’s to determine ways to get Americans eating real foods again. Instead, they fixated on cholesterol as the culprit in the rise of heart disease and discouraged the consumption of historically eaten animal fats.

In 1953, when biochemist Ancel Keys, Ph.D., argued that heart attacks could be prevented by avoiding cholesterol-laden foods, the scientific community was primed to embrace this message.
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Scientists had already observed that the incidence of heart disease was low in occupied Europe after World War II at a time when Europeans were eating less cholesterol (meat, dairy, eggs). Ignored was the fact that sugar, flour, alcohol, cigarettes, and gas were scarce after the war and so people were eating less sugar and refined white flour, drinking and smoking less, and walking more. Then there was the obvious fact that butter and other animal fats are yellow and viscous, just like the fatty deposits found in the arteries of autopsied heart attack victims. It stood to reason: Cut out the cholesterol from animal fat in your diet, and you would not have plaque in your arteries (even though it contains only an insignificant amount of cholesterol along with collagen, calcium, and other materials).

Keys arrived at his lipid hypothesis in his famous Seven Countries Study, in which he maintained that countries with the highest fat intake had the highest rates of heart disease.
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Keys was accused of handpicking data from the countries that supported his hypothesis and ignoring those that didn’t (data was available from twenty-two countries). And just as he ignored data from the countries that didn’t support his hypothesis,
Keys ignored the fact that in 1936, pathologist Kurt Landé and biochemist Warren Sperry of the Department of Forensic Medicine at New York University conducted an extensive study that found no correlation between the degree of atherosclerosis and blood cholesterol levels.
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These findings were repeated by Indian researchers in 1961, Polish researchers in 1962, Guatemalan researchers in 1967, and Americans in 1982.
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Lipid biochemist David Kritchevsky, Ph.D., was a young Russian immigrant in 1954 when he conducted studies that demonstrated that rabbits fed artificial cholesterol had elevated blood cholesterol levels while rabbits fed polyunsaturated vegetable oils had lowered cholesterol levels.
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(Fats fall roughly into three categories: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. The polyunsaturated fats used in animal studies were extracted from soy and corn.)

Similar studies, also done on animals, were said to prove the lipid hypothesis. But by the late 1950s, scientists understood the flaws inherent in studies that force-fed plant-eating rabbits an artificial, species-inappropriate diet. Dr. Kritchevsky agreed that artificial cholesterol is an unnatural food for a rabbit and remarked, “Alexander Pope said, ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ But I don’t think the average guy would submit to a diet and let me tear his aorta out after six months. Animal experiments are just animal experiments.” Nevertheless, animal experiments using inappropriate vegetarian test subjects were used to promote the lipid hypothesis.

It didn’t take much to frighten people into believing that saturated fats caused heart disease. America originated with Puritanism, after all. Like sex (which feels good), if food tastes good, it must be bad. So millions of Americans stopped eating eggs and butter and pushed away their steaks.

Next came the instruction to eat polyunsaturated vegetable oils to lower your risk for heart disease. This pronouncement was easy to swallow too because polyunsaturated fats were found to lower cholesterol levels in animal studies. What was not understood at the time was that polyunsaturated fatty acids lower blood cholesterol because when these fatty acids, which are soft, are deposited into the cell membrane, the body must stabilize the membrane by pulling cholesterol, which is denser, out of
the bloodstream and putting it into the cell structure. But because polyunsaturated fats were found to lower cholesterol levels in animal studies, the edible oil industry began heavily promoting polyunsaturated fats to the American public as heart healthy.

“The trouble is that science moves rather slowly, but promoters move quickly,” Dr. Kritchevsky said. “If you published six papers that said horse manure is good for you, two days later it would be on the market.” And so it was with polyunsaturated fat research. The edible oil industry hit the ground running with their polyunsaturated fats (and their wallets open to all government and health agencies that could help them promote these fats). Meanwhile science was left plodding slowly behind.

It’s always been very difficult to introduce a new idea into the scientific community, said Dr. Kritchevsky. “You know there’s an old saying that every new finding goes through three stages. First people say it’s against the Bible. Then they say it’s not wrong, but it’s not important. Well, it’s important, but we always knew it.” And so researchers were not willing to pay attention to any new evidence that supported dietary cholesterol and discouraged the consumption of processed polyunsaturated fats. They had all the evidence they needed to support the lipid hypothesis, to continue to vilify saturated animal fats, and to promote the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

Today the health benefits of small amounts of polyunsaturated fats as found in whole foods such as cold-water fish—cod, herring, mackerel, salmon, sardines, or fresh, nonrancid oils extracted from these fish—are well known. But the edible oil industry did not market naturally occurring polyunsaturated fats to Americans in small amounts. The oil industry manufactured and marketed factory fats made from polyunsaturated vegetable oils such as soy and corn and virtually inundated our food supply with these fats. Dr. Kritchevsky said that it wasn’t “a scam where two guys got together in back of the poolroom and said, ‘Let’s do this.’” Rather, it was the unregulated self-interest of capitalism that got Americans eating dangerous polyunsaturated vegetable fats.

PRIOR TO 1900, VEGETABLE
oil was processed out of its natural state (such as corn oil from corn) by small, slow, cold-temperature batch presses. But in the 1920s, industrialists realized that human-dependent, small batch cold-pressing was too slow and not profitable enough, so they switched to automated heat and chemical processes that produced high volumes of oil at a greater profit.

Unfortunately, these new processes did very bad things to oils. In simple terms, fatty acids are chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms filling the available bonds. A fatty acid is considered “saturated” when all available carbon bonds are occupied by a hydrogen atom. Monounsaturated fatty acids lack two hydrogen atoms, and polyunsaturated fatty acids lack still more. The level of hydrogen atom “saturation” determines how stable, or resistant to rancidity, a fatty acid is when exposed to heat, light, and oxygen. Saturated fatty acids are the least likely to oxidize/go rancid (create free radicals), monounsaturated fatty acids are the second most stable, and polyunsaturated fatty acids are the most fragile under these conditions.

The heat and chemical processing of polyunsaturated oils goes like this: Seeds, kernels, fruits, and nuts are hulled and ground, which exposes their oils to air and light and begins the rancidity process, creating free radical oxidation.

After hulling, the pulp is cooked for up to two hours at high
temperatures—creating more free radical oxidation. Subsequent pressing also exposes the oil to heat, causing a chemical reaction that essentially creates the same chemical constituent as plastic, varnish, and shellac. Another method of removing the oil from raw sources uses chemical solvents, which also infuses the oil with free radicals.

After the initial heat and chemical processing of vegetable oils, the oils are then often “de-gummed”: Phosphoric acid (used in bathroom cleaners) and high temperatures to remove impurities and nutrients, a process that increases rancidity/free radical oxidation. To remove free fatty acids and minerals from the oil, sodium hydroxide (i.e., lye, which is also used in Drano and Easy Off oven cleaner) and high temperatures are used. Subsequent bleaching removes undesirable pigments from oils. At this point, the oils may possess pungent odors and tastes that must be removed through a high-temperature deodorizing process.

Some of these oils end up in row upon row of glistening, sanitary-looking cooking oils on your supermarket shelves. But much of this heat-and chemical-processed oil is partially hydrogenated. This process alters the molecular structure of the fatty acid by adding hydrogen atoms, changing the chemical structure from a “cis” shape that is recognized and utilized by human cells to a “trans” shape that is foreign and lethal to human physiology. Partial hydrogenation turns polyunsaturated vegetable oil into a hardened-butter-like product that holds up better than liquid oils in food-production processes and has a longer shelf life.