Doctors and other health professionals claim there is ample proof that animal fats cause heart disease while they confidently advise us to adopt a lowfat diet; actually the literature contains only two studies involving humans that compared the outcome (not markers like cholesterol levels) of a diet high in animal fat with a diet based on vegetable oils, and both showed that animal fats are protective.
The Anti-Coronary Club project, launched in 1957 and published in 1966 in the "Journal of the American Medical Association", compared two groups of New York businessmen, aged 49 to 59 years. One group followed the so-called “Prudent Diet” consisting of corn oil and margarine instead of butter, cold breakfast cereals instead of eggs and chicken and fish instead of beef; a control group ate eggs for breakfast and meat three times per day. The final report noted that the Prudent Dieters had average serum cholesterol of 222mg/l, compared to 250 mg/l in the eggs-and-meat group. But there were EIGHT deaths from heart disease among the Prudent Dieter group, and NONE among those who ate meat three times a day.
In a study published in the "British Medical Journal", 1965, patients who had already had a heart attack were divided into three groups: one group got polyunsaturated corn oil, the second got monounsaturated olive oil and the third group was told to eat animal fat. After two years, the corn oil group had 30 percent lower cholesterol, but only 52 percent of them were still alive. The olive oil groups fared little better – only 57 percent were alive after two years. But of the group that ate mostly animal fat, 75 percent were still alive after two years.
Cited in "Wise Traditions", Spring 2004
And a word about CHOLESTEROL:
“Our bodies cannot function without cholesterol. This waxy lipid (fat) is used to manufacture estrogen and testosterone, vitamin D, bile, skin oils, nerve- and brain-cell sheaths (indeed, the body’s richest concentration of cholesterol is in the brain). Our livers make all the cholesterol we need [whether or not we eat it] . . .Under optimum conditions, cholesterol constantly shuttles back and forth between the liver and body cells, where it’s needed aboard lipoproteins (these too are synthesized in the liver).. . . What about too little blood cholesterol? Is that dangerous? Researchers now believe that people with cholesterol levels below 160 are at greater risk of liver cancer, non-malignant lung disease, brain hemorrhage, even alcoholism and suicide, although they can’t say why. Nor can they explain why some people have basement blood cholesterol levels although they suspect it has more to do with heredity than diet.” The Nutrition Bible by Jean Anderson, M.S. and Barbara Deskins, Ph.D., R.D.