by Warren M. Levin, M.D., FAAFP, FACN, FAAEM
The good fat/bad fat controversy is inextricably bound up with the cholesterol theory of coronary artery disease. That’s because there is really good “scientific” statistical evidence of a correlation between the high intakes of animal fats—which are high in cholesterol—with coronary artery disease (and other manifestations of hardening of the arteries), cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, and cancer of the breast. However, the composition of animal fat in terms of the fatty acids and cholesterol that it is made of hasn’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years. Nevertheless, the incidence of all of the diseases enumerated above has skyrocketed just in the last half of this century!
Another interesting statistic is that the number of heart attacks is remarkably correlated to the number of radios in this country! I would like to speak for a small but growing group of scientists who believe that it isn’t the fat that God put in animals from time immemorial that is the cause of the problems (including cholesterol), but rather the contamination of that pristine healthy animal fat with man-made chemicals. In the last 50 years, since Upton Sinclair’s powerful expose of the meat markets in Chicago (The Jungle), things have gotten steadily worse for the animals and the humans that eat them. Today, the intention of the cattle raising barons is to make the beef fatter faster. By experimentation they have discovered changes from the ancestral diet that encourage this deposition of “marbling” which makes the meat succulent and therefore more flavorful, and therefore more capable of fetching a higher price per pound—even though the protein content is relatively less than that of leaner animals. In addition to this drastic change in the content of the diet, the animals are housed so that they are unable to move around, making them bovine couch potatoes, so that they burn up fewer calories, and therefore accumulate even more weight as fat. The food that is supplied to these sedentary animals comes from farms whose goal is to produce maximum yield per acre. The agricultural scientists have created a mega industry in providing animal feed to the cattle raising industry. The agricultural scientist discovered in this century that artificial fertilizers stimulate the more rapid growth of plants to a larger size than the old-fashioned natural fertilizers.
Unfortunately, these aberrations of the plant kingdom provide less nutrients and also tend to be more susceptible to their natural enemies, the various kinds of insects. That created another mega industry—pesticides. Naturally, the crops, once harvested were also more susceptible to the various and sundry molds and smuts, typical of stored grains. Ergo, the fungicide industry. The animals eating substandard food, unable to exercise, became susceptible to infectious diseases—it was a wonderful coincidence then that the antibiotics that were required to control infections seemed to also increase the fat content of the animals! And, just to enhance the growth rate even further, various hormones are fed to these hapless creatures.
And so, the stage is set for the final insult that I believe is the underlying cause of the statistical aberration that has unfairly laid the blame for cancer on animal fat: All of the aforementioned interventions are fat soluble chemicals, and they therefore concentrate in the fatty tissue of these animals. Most of these artificial substances behave in the body like weak estrogens! They are not, however, the natural estrogen that is healthful for the body—these artificial unnatural estrogens are probably the trigger—the cause—of the increased incidence of cancer. Every healthy man and woman that has ever walked the earth has had natural human estrogens circulating in the blood stream and bathing all of the cells. The highest levels occur in pregnant women. Nature doesn’t cause pregnant women to carry high levels of a cancer causing hormone during pregnancy! The animals themselves don’t live long enough to develop cancer-causing hormone during pregnancy! The animals themselves don’t live long enough to develop cancer—they are raised for slaughter. It is the next step on the food chain—we human beings—that further concentrate these toxins in our system and express the increased propensity to develop cancer. The chemicals also trigger Free Radical production and thus contribute to coronary artery disease.
And what about the cholesterol in animal fat? It is a necessary factor for both the animals and mankind. It plays a critically essential role in the cell membranes of all of the cells in animal bodies. It’s time we stopped blaming nature for causing cancer and heart disease with animal fat—Mother Nature and Father God didn’t make such a stupid mistake!
The bottom line: Eat organic meat, fowl, and eggs—as Nature intended!
Reference: “Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival” Theo Colborn –World Wildlife Fund, 1996.