Can you think of a fundamental reason not to expect that it's healthy and good, not particularly to be limited below what you have a taste for?
Stop and think about it. Forget everything you think you know (which, if we're talking knowledge, is probably not much: you're just regurgitating). Why would it not be healthful, beneficial? Because it's so tasty and we're depraved by nature, naturally seeking mostly those things from "the devil's playground?" Could it be, rather, that it's because it's so good for us that we have a such a taste for it? And then, if it turns out that it actually is good for us, does that not make the "experts" and "authorities" more evil than well meaning, and, does it not make us more childlike and foolish than inquisitive and honest?
Why wouldn't it be healthful, naturally, when you find it in large percentages in the animal fats associated with all meats? You even find it in the animal fat associated with human meat, in roughly the same proportion as pigs (i.e., lard). ...And what of a "lard ass," to whom you might recommend a low-cal, low-fat diet? Would that be advisable if saturated fat is unhealthy? After all, the fat is locked away in that large rump. A low-cal, low-fat diet is just going to release it into the bloodstream where it can wreak its havoc.
If we were all thinking straight -- perhaps like a hunter-gatherer all on his own, responsible on a daily basis to look around, observe, think, integrate, plan, exercise extreme caution -- and all that just to eat --we might scoff at the notion of animal fat being "bad for us." In comparison, supermarket cart-wheeling moderns are woefully ignorant -- perhaps even the hunters and fishermen among us. Sure, you can get out there for a weekend or so, but do you go without any groceries? Could you do it for life?
So, would you expect these super informed and experienced people to eschew animal products in favor of leaves and various fibers? You wouldn't, would you? What you would expect is for them to go after the most dense nutrition they could safely source, which would be various animals of all kinds -- along with their saturated fat. And they've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, which very clear from the anthropological record. Moreover, their skeletal remains are larger in stature, with healthier, straighter teeth when compared to those of ancient agricultural populations.
And, so, given our millions of years of evolution, one would naturally expect saturated fat to be not only "OK," or, "taken in moderation," but actually healthful! Really healthful. One would expect it to be quite an unusual shocker if that wasn't so. In fact, the level of unabashed shock at such a revelation should have been so profound as to have demand decades of contradictory-free guiding principles, gold standard research...leading to infallible proof...before even giving it a second thought.
Instead, we we were led down a fool's path by opportunistic miscreants who to this very day ignore what honest people like Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD, have been saying for years. Not only that. These researchers are so opportunistic that they actually obfuscate with purposefully flawed studies designed to get the results they set out to get in the first place, which isn't science, but rather the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, just to keep the crap afloat. Dr. Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths and Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You has up a three part series on saturated fat at Spacedoc.net.
For several years skeptical scientists including myself have asked the experts on the Swedish National Food Administration for the scientific studies that allow them to warn against saturated fat. Their usual answers have been that "there are thousands of such studies", or they refer to the WHO ( World Health Organization ) guidelines, (1) said to have been written by the world's greatest experts.
The main argument in that document is that saturated fat raises cholesterol, but we now know that high cholesterol is not a disease. What we want to know is if we shorten our lives or if we run a greater risk of getting a heart attack or a stroke by eating too much saturated fat.
Recently the Swedish Food Administration published a list of 72 studies that they claimed were in support of their warnings. Together with eleven colleagues I scrutinized the list and found that only two of them were in support.
Eleven studies did not concern saturated fat at all. Sixteen studies were about saturated fat, but were not in support. Three reviews had ignored all contradictory studies. Eleven studies gave partial or doubtful support. Eight studies concerned reviews of experiments where the treatment included not only a "healthy" diet, but also weight reduction, smoking cessation and physical exercise. So how did they know whether the small effect was due to less saturated fat or to something else? Furthermore, all of them had excluded trials with a negative outcome.
Twenty-one studies were about surrogate outcomes. In most of the reports the authors claimed that saturated fat raises cholesterol. But again, high cholesterol is not a disease. Twelve studies were listed because they had shown that people on a diet with much saturated fat and little carbohydrates reacted more slowly on insulin than normally. From that observation the authors claimed that saturated fat causes diabetes, but they had jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Saturated fat does not produce diabetes; on the contrary. More than a dozen experiments have shown that the best diet for people with type 2 diabetes is one with much saturated fat and very little carbohydrates. In a few days their blood sugar normalizes and many of the patients are able to stop their medication. (2)
That's the first part of part 1, so go read the whole series, which isn't very long. You might also want to go read about the generally good health of the highest saturated fat consuming people on the planet, the Tokelauans.
Oh, but there's more. And, since I have to thank Dr. Eades for alerting to these articles via Twitter, I'll thank him for the other link too, which I'll get to in a minute.
In part 2 of Ravnskov's series, he brings to light some research done in India.
For six years Indian researcher Malhotra registered how many died from a heart attack among the more than one million employees of the Indian railways.
According to Malhotra's report employees who lived in Madras had the highest mortality. It was six to seven times higher than in Punjab, the district with the lowest mortality, and they died at a much younger age. But people in Punjab ate almost seventeen times more fat than people from Madras and most of it was animal fat. In addition they smoked much more.(14)
Hmm. Well, there's also this, just out, about how vegetarian Indians are dropping from coronary artery disease at an alarming rate.
Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, India.
The incidence of coronary artery disease (CAD) is increasing at an alarming rate, especially in developing countries, such as India. It is often advocated that a vegetarian lifestyle could reduce the burden of CAD. However, in spite of a majority of Indians being vegetarians, the incidence of CAD is highest in this population. This may be due to deficiency of vitamin B12, a micronutrient, sourced only from animal products.
See how it all comes together. Vegetarianism is a myth, a menace. No wonder they're such bedfellows with that other menace: those with the audacity to sweep aside 2.5 million years of evolution to implicate as unhealthy a core building block of our very bodies.
Curse them all.
Can you think of a fundamental reason not to expect that it's healthy and good, not particularly to be limited below what you have a taste for?
Stop and think about it. Forget everything you think you know (which, if we're talking knowledge, is probably not much: you're just regurgitating). Why would it not be healthful, beneficial? Because it's so tasty and we're depraved by nature, naturally seeking mostly those things from "the devil's playground?" Could it be, rather, that it's because it's so good for us that we have a such a taste for it? And then, if it turns out that it actually is good for us, does that not make the "experts" and "authorities" more evil than well meaning, and, does it not make us more childlike and foolish than inquisitive and honest?
Why wouldn't it be healthful, naturally, when you find it in large percentages in the animal fats associated with all meats? You even find it in the animal fat associated with human meat, in roughly the same proportion as pigs (i.e., lard). ...And what of a "lard ass," to whom you might recommend a low-cal, low-fat diet? Would that be advisable if saturated fat is unhealthy? After all, the fat is locked away in that large rump. A low-cal, low-fat diet is just going to release it into the bloodstream where it can wreak its havoc.
If we were all thinking straight -- perhaps like a hunter-gatherer all on his own, responsible on a daily basis to look around, observe, think, integrate, plan, exercise extreme caution -- and all that just to eat --we might scoff at the notion of animal fat being "bad for us." In comparison, supermarket cart-wheeling moderns are woefully ignorant -- perhaps even the hunters and fishermen among us. Sure, you can get out there for a weekend or so, but do you go without any groceries? Could you do it for life?
So, would you expect these super informed and experienced people to eschew animal products in favor of leaves and various fibers? You wouldn't, would you? What you would expect is for them to go after the most dense nutrition they could safely source, which would be various animals of all kinds -- along with their saturated fat. And they've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, which very clear from the anthropological record. Moreover, their skeletal remains are larger in stature, with healthier, straighter teeth when compared to those of ancient agricultural populations.
And, so, given our millions of years of evolution, one would naturally expect saturated fat to be not only "OK," or, "taken in moderation," but actually healthful! Really healthful. One would expect it to be quite an unusual shocker if that wasn't so. In fact, the level of unabashed shock at such a revelation should have been so profound as to have demand decades of contradictory-free guiding principles, gold standard research...leading to infallible proof...before even giving it a second thought.
Instead, we we were led down a fool's path by opportunistic miscreants who to this very day ignore what honest people like Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD, have been saying for years. Not only that. These researchers are so opportunistic that they actually obfuscate with purposefully flawed studies designed to get the results they set out to get in the first place, which isn't science, but rather the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, just to keep the crap afloat. Dr. Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths and Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You has up a three part series on saturated fat at Spacedoc.net.
That's the first part of part 1, so go read the whole series, which isn't very long. You might also want to go read about the generally good health of the highest saturated fat consuming people on the planet, the Tokelauans.
Oh, but there's more. And, since I have to thank Dr. Eades for alerting to these articles via Twitter, I'll thank him for the other link too, which I'll get to in a minute.
In part 2 of Ravnskov's series, he brings to light some research done in India.
Hmm. Well, there's also this, just out, about how vegetarian Indians are dropping from coronary artery disease at an alarming rate.
See how it all comes together. Vegetarianism is a myth, a menace. No wonder they're such bedfellows with that other menace: those with the audacity to sweep aside 2.5 million years of evolution to implicate as unhealthy a core building block of our very bodies.
Curse them all.