It’s Monday – and time for another Real Food Quote Monday (RFQM). Today, I’m sharing a few paragraphs from Dr. Mary Enig’s and Sally Fallon Morell’s book, “Eat Fat, Lose Fat.”
The topic is saturated fats, at the beginning of Chapter 2, where Dr. Enig and Sally Fallon Morell set the stage by pointing out where dietary conventional wisdom has gone wrong for the last four decades.
“If you’re like most people we meet, when you hear about the benefits of coconut and other saturated fats, you may wonder, “If saturated fat is so great, why have I always been told it’s bad?” The fact is that for the last four decades, saturated fats, including coconut oil, have been banned from general consumption, condemned and locked away for the misdeeds of polyunsaturated fats, trans fats, and refined carbohydrates, foods that are still at large wreaking havoc with American waistlines (not to mention our life expectancy).
If eating saturated fat caused heart disease and weight gain, then eliminating those fats should have resulted in a decline in heart disease and an increase in weight loss. But look around you. That’s not what happened! While we American have been dutifully eliminating fat from our diet, eating low-fat foods, and avoiding saturated fats from tropical oils, butter, and red meats, obesity rates and the overall incidence of heart disease have continued to climb.
The truth is that the “diet police” condemned the wrong culprit. It was not saturated fat or coconut oil (a dietary staple in countries such as Thailand and the Philippines with consistently lower heart disease rates than our own) that caused our galloping heart disease rates. An entire body of research implicates refined grains and sugars (especially high-fructose corn syrup) — not saturated fats — as the cause of obesity, and vegetable oils and trans fats as key factors in heart disease.”
Shocking, isn’t it? Then again, maybe not. In the rest of the chapter, Dr. Enig and Sally Fallon Morell go on to address four myths about saturated fat:
- Myth: High fat foods cause heart disease. Blog post here, 3/20/10.
- Myth: High cholesterol causes heart disease. Blog post here, 3/27/10.
- Myth: High-fat foods increase blood cholesterol. Blog post here, 4/5/10.
- Myth: Cholesterol causes plaque buildup in arteries. Blog post here, 4/12/10.
For the next four weeks of RFQM, I will briefly cover their answers to these myths through quotes from this book. For now, though, what do you think? Are you shocked? Have you known this for awhile? Are you still on the fence?
Note: The book link in this post is an affiliate link to Amazon.com. If you choose to buy the book via my link, I’ll earn a commission. But I don’t care about that too much. The point of this post is for us to share inspirational words. That’s my sincere disclaimer. Thanks for reading.
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I suspected this long before I read anything by Sally Fallon Morell. Even as a teenager and young adult, I cooked with butter because I figured it had to be healthier than margarine because it was more natural. Then, when my parents went on a low carb diet after being on a low fat diet, my mom’s high cholesterol finally went DOWN, even though they were eating more animal fats.
The first time I read Nourishing Traditions, which has some of this same info, I was like, “see, this makes a lot of sense and just confirms what I already know.”
.-= Rebecca´s last blog post… Menu Plan Monday – Week of 3/8/10 =-.
That’s great, Rebecca. I wish I could say the same! I fell for the low-fat craze hook, line and sinker when I was in college. Then I read Nourishing Traditions when married, and I felt sheepish, like this makes so much sense, why didn’t I realize this before? To my husband’s credit, he’s like you – natural always made more sense.
I love this — and I, too, fell for fat-free in college. Then proceeded to gain about 20 pounds.
I never could stay at a consistent weight until I stopped worrying about fat grams, and stopped eating so much sugar. It wasn’t even intentional — sugar just made me shaky and sometimes nauseated. So I stopped putting it in my coffee, and stopped snacking on candy and high-sugar snacks. All of a sudden, my weight never fluctuated, and I was free from thinking about calories.
I’m glad I now have access to articles that explain why this happened — but wish I was better able to convince my family members and friends of the same thing.
.-= Katy@ThoughtForFood´s last blog post… Damage control =-.
When I was a child I was the picture of health, despite the fact that I should have been born with a high probability of every mental and physical health problem. Instead I thrived. Then we lived in a rural area and ate a lot of real dairy products and meat. I’m not saying we skipped the produce or carbs, but no one ever accused us of being on diets. My whole family thrived. When we moved to suburbia we ate a lot more refined foods and as our waists expanded we started cutting out dairy and animal products. Every one of us became obese and suffered terrible health because of it. Now that I’m transitioning back to real food, I’m getting healthier again.
I wasn’t shocked when I read that but I did want to kick myself. I wish I would have put the two together before my son’s health suffered.
I was one of those people that thought white pasta was health food, and ate as many Snackwells as I wanted because they were fat-free. I love reading about nutrition, and still see the wrong information being taught. I am reading Racing Weight, because I love to run and can’t seem to figure out how to get the weight off, and the book recommends eating nutrient dense foods, but when you flip to the recipe section, you find white flour and sugar.
I would love if people gave tips on how to get down 2 Tbsp. of coconut oil before meals that this book recommends for weight loss. I literally couldn’t stomach it!
Hum…. kind of makes me wonder when I think about people who watched what they ate and always struggled with their weight, while those that seemed to eat whatever they wanted, in moderation, never seemed to have weight issues.
Now I wonder – was it like this fact about ‘good’ fat consumption?
My thoughts on this were somewhat similar to Rebecca’s. I actually grew up on a farm, where we ate lots of fresh veggies from the garden in the summers, putting up lots of them for the winter, and when I was really little, butchering our own chickens and beef (my dad and grandfather farmed cows and chickens). However, as I got older, we started buying more and more of that stuff from the store, my mom used mostly margarine and moved more and more to processed boxed items.
When I got out on my own, I made the switch to butter pretty early, as my thought has always been that the “real” thing HAD to be better than the fake. I did dutifully drink my low-fat (1%, could never tolerate skim!) milk, even though I’ve always LOVED whole milk. It’s like I think I’ve always resented the whole “low fat to be healthy” bit…I did it, because I thought I was supposed to, but in the back of my mind, I was always thinking “why CAN’T I use more butter to cook my eggs or saute my veggies?” and it just never settled well with me.
So, when I finally found the info on Weston Price, and really dug into it, I made the switch in my head almost instantly. It really makes more sense to me than ANYTHING else I’ve read/seen/heard before on nutrition. I’ve always been interested in the subject, but I’ve never read a philosophy on the subject that made so much common sense to me as this, like all the pieces of the puzzle have just fallen into place, FINALLY!
I too have been eating real butter for a number of years, and raising my own grass fed cow every year since we moved to our small farm 9 years ago. I just received the book in the mail yesterday and am anxious to read it. I feel so blessed to be finding all this truth about food that confirms many of the suspicions I have had for years.
Forty years of real food like butter and coconut oil getting the boot by so called ‘experts’ have finally caught up with America’s waistline and health issues…look around and we can see that for all the wrong information that has been peddled off as the ‘right foods to eat’, Americans continue to be at risk for heart disease, obesity and diabetes…clearly the ‘experts’ need to rethink the data and research that has been around since the ’20s and go back to the drawing board…and then they need to step up to the plate and do the right thing and start (re)educating America about the fact that saturated fats like butter and coconut are not the culprits for America’s health issues…these saturated fats are essential and critical in paving the way for Americans to (re)claim their health AND their waistlines…good health and nutrition has always been here for us to (re)claim…we just need to stop listening to ‘experts’, do our own research (like with educational resources like Nourishing Traditions), and start becoming our OWN experts in feeding our bodies healthy foods God gave us to use.
Kelli….I have been using organic coconut oil for years & I start every morning with a heaping tablespoon in my breakfast smoothie…makes it extra smooooth & you don’t even know it’s in there! YUM!!
also have used butter all my life & while some of my siblings had cholestrol problems, mine was always fine! Ever since that first taste of my grandma’s hand-churned butter…I was hooked! Also, never limited my intake of eggs either….always knew that God’s food was best! Now, the only change I’ve made is to treat my family to raw butter & organic, free-range brown eggs…hope to have my own backyard chickens soon!
It’s funny because the thing I noticed that caused my weight to stop fluctuating was actually salt. I am the Salt and my husband is the Sweet. When I changed out my salt to celtic sea salt and stopped eating processed foods laden with the bad salt, my weight fluctuations came to a screeching halt. It is the coolest thing. I used to fluctuate 5-7 lbs either way. Now, the only time i seem to gain weight is if I eat something processed and full of sodium. Definitely something to think about.
Kelli, I put a T of coconut oil in my black coffee each morning. It’s an odd texture, like bouillon, with the fat floating on top, but it tastes ok, and actually softens the bite if the coffee happens to be a tad “burnt”. I’m not sure how I’d tolerate it in just hot water or mild flavored tea, but it’s just fine in coffee. Start with just a tsp and see how you do.
.-= Gigi´s last blog post… Hot Chocolate – Dairy Free =-.
Kelli….I just melt 2T of coconut oil from Tropical Traditions in hot water, add a pinch of sucanat or maple syrup (literally a pinch) and drink a nicley flavored coconut tea. It’s quite tasty.