Animal Fats or Vegetable Oils?


The information here seems to be vital to our future well being and we therefore asked permission to reproduce it as received.
The original article was sent to us via e-mail in May 2001 but sadly we have been unable to obtain permission to paste the full copyright version here and so restrict this page only to comments on the article.

It should be remembered that many pesticides are stored in fats and oils in both animals and plants.
Those pesticides and their co-formulants may themselves alter the way the body deals with such substances.
As with squalene, cholesterol is an intermediate substrate in the formation process for hormones.

Any interference with this process may lead eventually to hormonal imbalances.

The discussion concerns the following article.

Subject: Fw: The Oiling of America by Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. and Sally Fallon.
Date: 28 May 2001 09:19
The Oiling of America by Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. and Sally Fallon
MOUNT RAINIER CLINIC, Yelm, Washington - MOUNT ROGERS CLINIC, Trout Dale, Virginia.

Review.

The article suggests that we are all the victims of misinformation as to the dangers of animal fats and that we have been conned by big business and governments into believing that margarines are in some way the healthier option. This it is claimed was part of an elaborate plot designed to enhance profit at the expense of human health.

The article was originally published in Nexus Magazine in 1998 and 1999.

It begins by outlining the beginning of the debate on the dangers of cholesterol and the advantages of Polyunsaturated fatty acids and suggests that this began in Russia in 1954 with a young researcher, David Kritchevsky, who had studied the effects of cholesterol in rabbits.

It should perhaps be remembered at this point that almost all of the cholesterol in the human body is synthesized within the body whether the food is of vegetable or animal origin and that if we had no cholesterol at all in our diet then the body would have to find a way of producing it or die. It is vital for life and provides the building blocks for hormone formation.

Heart disease was responsible for about 10% of deaths in the early part of the 20th century but this rose rapidly and became one of the major reasons for death in the Western world.
It is suggested that the reason for this increase was diet although it seems that the presence of dangerous chemicals in that diet which are capable of altering the essential metabolic processes and known to damage the heart itself were not considered.

It is suggested that butter consumption declined and that the use of vegetable oils and products made to seem like butter increased. This led to the conclusion that movement away from the traditional diets that had sustained life for centuries was actually harming the population.

Current scientific opinion however seems to promote the opposite view.

However the paper refers to several human population studies which appear to show that even races with a largely vegetarian diet have suffered with similar diseases.
This seems to indicate that science is looking in entirely the wrong place for the explanation.

Despite this the article reports that those attempting to reduce the rate of deaths from heart failure promoted the use corn oil, margarine and breakfast cereals instead of butter and eggs and advised changes from eating red meats such as beef to chicken and fish. Such changes when taken up by large numbers of the population have had dramatic and sometimes devastating effects on traditional agricultural methods and have indirectly caused increased chemical use in the food production industries.

Surprisingly, despite the contradictory evidence, medicinal claims were made for the new foods and the manufacturers made claims for longer life and better health when using the new oils.
It would appear from this article that these claims were based on false science.

In fact it appeared from the statistics that the increase in heart disease followed the increased use of vegetable oils but again there is no mention of the parallel increases in the use of dangerous chemicals found as residues in those foods.

The article suggests that it was found in a controlled studies that there were heart deaths amongst those on the new diet but none or similar numbers in the groups eating red meat and eggs in the traditional diet.

It would seem that it may not simply be the oils that are the problem but the dangers may stem from the need to alter the structure of the oils, which are usually in the liquid form at room temperatures, in order to make them appear and act more like butter and animal fats which are normally solid at such temperatures.
The process of hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils made them solid at room temperature by rearranging the structure of the oil molecules.
This process actually makes the oils more like the natural fats that they are intended to "replace" the body readily incorporates them into the cells where they can cause the malfunction of normal cell activities.

These new processes allowed the increase in production of soya bean crops which now form the major percentage of all hydrogenated oils.

Today much of the Soya crop is the new Genetically modified type designed to withstand repeated applications of the systemic glyphosate herbicide. This chemical enters every cell of the plant and the EU recently raised the maximum permitted residue level for that chemical in order, it seems, to permit the import of soya based animal feeds.

In the modern world few people know exactly what they are eating and we are now subjected to an ever increasing number of foods which appear to be of the traditional type but which are in fact chemically induced imitations of the real thing which do not have the same digestive properties. Meanwhile the markets for the real thing are being removed which could mean disaster in the long term.

Meanwhile the use of chemical dependent food and "real food" substitutes rises and the rates for cancer and heart disease rise with them. The GM crop debate is stifled at every opportunity and pesticide safety issues are hidden by the regulators as the problems grow worse.

There is much comment in this article about "enzyme inhibition" but no mention of the proven fact that many of the pesticides, including the systemic organophosphorus herbicide glyphosate are known to inhibit essential enzymes.

In fact many of the symptoms attributed to these vegetable oils are known to be caused also by the organophosphorus compounds found increasingly in our food and in the environment.

Whatever the truth is about vegetable oils it is clear that cholesterol is essential for life and that it is the "good guy" in the debate. It also plays a vital role in serotonin function which is said also to be a target for Organophosphorus compounds and without it aggressive and violent behaviour or depression and suicide may result, again as seen in poisoning cases.

There are some 66 references listed in the original article.

The email as sent to us with the original article can be forwarded on request providing the copyright is respected.

Dated 18/8/2001

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