So how did our nation’s dietary guidelines come into being in the first place guiding us to where we are today? There was a seminal moment in our collective history where the norm of consuming reasonable amounts of dietary fat and protein took a pivotal turn to low fat and high carbohydrate foods. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s a stretch to believe that this may have all started with a bunch of refuse seeds, and someone whose life’s work was studying fish…
What you are about to read is a very brief synopsis of the events that have led to today’s food guidelines (with respect to dietary fats - - grains & sugars will be covered later), and as such, may give you pause in terms of understanding why you eat the foods you do, and why perhaps our nation is so fat, sick and nearly dead.
Here goes.
Up until the industrial revolution and the turn of the 20th century, whale oil was widely used for energy and manufacturing, but was replaced with petroleum and cottonseed oil.
Widely used in general manufacturing, cottonseed oil and petroleum get a huge boost in WWI for manufacturing weapons, making and powering war craft and war machines; including using cottonseed oil in paint & paint thinners among other industrial uses. Through the cottonseed oil extraction process however, mounds and mounds of cottonseed seed refuse result. The seeds are sold to Proctor & Gamble (used initially for making soap) who figure out a way to use them in food. Presto! Crisco is born, but not widely used - yet.
Fast forward to post WWII, and President Eisenhower's heart attack 1952. People were nervous and scared that their sitting president was out of the oval office for an extended period of time. Doctors were searching for answers as the public awaited answers. Cardiology was a nonexistent medical specialty at the time. President Eisenhower was prescribed the newly popular high carb/low cholesterol diet, but continued to smoke and drink. He suffered seven more heart attacks from 1955 until his death, and ironically died from a heart attack due to high blood pressure & elevated blood glucose complications in 1969.
Up until this time obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease are virtually unheard of, and represent a footnote in terms of percentages of people who have these diseases.
Enter Dr. Ancel Keys, a Ph.D. marine biologist (specialty: zoology) who studied the physiology of fish in Copenhagen, Denmark. Years later at the University of Minnesota, he utilizes and establishes the standard for epidemiological studies, which do not follow the scientific method, nor are they scientific experiments, and above all, are not the same as randomized control trials researchers use to establish causation and death.
In 1952 Dr. Keys postulates that saturated fat (primarily from animal sources) in our diet would collect and stick in our arteries leading to heart failure from his epidemiological Seven Countries Study known today as the “heart-lipid hypothesis” based on food frequency questionnaires.
Without taking into consideration multi-factorial data points (see graph below), let alone establishing causation from fat in the diet to establish the cause of heart disease and death (because he cherry-picked his data points selecting only those countries that met his preconceived ideas on saturated animal-sourced fats, rather than revealing what the complete data from all 22 countries revealed), Dr. Keys fakes it and vigorously promotes himself and his observational survey study’s results as factual evidence, which ultimately leads to the establishment of our nation’s food guidelines via the Food Pyramid.
In a 1952 presentation at Mt. Sinai in New York (later published in several papers that together received enormous attention), Keys formally introduced this idea, which he called his “diet-heart hypothesis.” His graph showed a close correlation between fat intake and death rates from heart disease in six countries. It was a perfect upward curve, like a child’s growth chart. Keys’ graph suggested that if you extended the curve back down to zero fat intake, your risk of heart disease would nearly disappear. This connect-the-dot exercise in 1952 was the acorn that grew into the giant oak tree of our mistrust of fat today. All of the ailments that have been ascribed to eating fat over the years—not just heart disease but also obesity, cancer, diabetes, and more—stem from the implantation of this idea in the nutrition establishment by Ancel Keys and his perseverance in promoting it. Now, as you eat a salad with a lean chicken breast for lunch and choose pasta over steak for dinner, those choices can be traced back to him. The influence of Keys on the world of nutrition has been unparalleled.
Teicholz, N. (2014). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet Simon & Schuster. (p. 28).
After President Eisenhower's heart attack, and the widely published results of Ancel Keys’ study, Procter & Gamble (who in 1911 uses for cottonseeds to create Crisco) figured out a way to promote Crisco, an inexpensive cooking fat. Seeing a prospective gold mine opportunity, they soon capitalized on Ancel Keys’ unchallenged ‘proof’ that saturated fat causes heart attacks.
How?
Proctor & Gamble were able to successfully promote the use of Crisco, an inexpensive manufactured polyunsaturated fat that had a consistency similar to expensive butter by providing a free cookbook using their product. Crisco soon becomes the new standard for all cooking and baking needs in American homes, instead of ‘old fashioned’ butter, tropical oils, tallow and suet (all saturated fats used for centuries), as a way to ‘help’ Americans avert heart disease.
Soon, other manufacturers begin making other alternatives to saturated fat including margarine from other polyunsaturated seed and vegetable oils including corn, soy, rapeseed (aka canola) among others. We now see these highly inflammatory, omega 6 polyunsaturated oils used to cook with in all restaurants, and is in virtually ALL canned, jarred, and processed packaged foods across our country.
Next… Part II
