THE TRUTH ABOUT MITOCHONDRIA, FREE RADICALS, AND DIETARY FATS
Because you are reading this book, I am assuming two things about you:
I’m also fairly certain that you are confused about what to eat in order to regain your health. I get it. Honestly, I don’t see how you could avoid feeling at a loss here, as the food and pharmaceutical industries have effectively manipulated the conversation—and lobbied the government—to distort the truth in the quest to benefit their bottom line.
They have systematically and intentionally misled you about what is healthy and what isn’t.
I spend the majority of my free waking hours reading the research and interviewing leading scientists in these areas. Even though I am trained as a family physician and have treated over 25,000 patients, I am still continuously refining and rethinking my understanding of what a healthy diet truly is.
In this chapter, I’m going to explain a few key concepts to arm you with the reasons why the eating plan I’ll outline in the second half of this book works to restore health and ward off disease. First, I’ll cover exactly what mitochondria are, and then I’ll explain how fat can be either a friend or a foe depending on what type of fat it is and how it is processed—and how the nutritional guidance we’ve received from medical associations, doctors, mainstream media, and the government have led us astray. By the end of this chapter, I hope you’ll have a clear understanding of why it’s so important to take care of your mitochondria, and exactly how harmful a typical American diet is to these tiny physiological wonders.
MEET YOUR MITOCHONDRIA
Perhaps you recall hearing about mitochondria in your high school biology class or have read about mitochondrial disease on the Internet, but you are still not quite sure what mitochondria are or what function they serve. Mitochondria are so vital to your health that if you are interested in warding off and healing from disease, it is critical for you to learn more about them.
Mitochondria are tiny organelles (think of them as micro-organs) contained within nearly all your cells. One of their many critical roles is to produce energy by combining nutrients from the sugars and fats you eat with oxygen from the air you breathe.
Researchers estimate that mitochondria account for 10 percent of your body weight, with approximately 10 million billion within the cells of an average adult.1 If that number is hard to comprehend, consider that more than 1 billion mitochondria would fit on the head of a pin.
Some cells have more mitochondria than others. For example, female germ cells, known as oocytes, have hundreds of thousands, while mature red blood cells and skin cells have few to none. Most cells, including liver cells, have somewhere between 80 and 2,000 mitochondria. The more metabolically active cells are—such as those found in the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and muscles—the more mitochondria they have. You can imagine, then, that having healthy, well-functioning mitochondria will have a wide-ranging and powerfully positive impact on your overall health.
Mitochondria continuously generate energy molecules called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Are you curious, as I was, to know how much ATP is actually generated? I suspect you will be surprised to learn that your mitochondria produce about 110 pounds of ATP every day.2
According to Power, Sex, Suicide, Nick Lane’s excellent book on mitochondria, this enormous army of organelles is hard at work every second of the day, pumping out 10,000 times more energy, gram for gram, than the sun. Every second!
So you can appreciate that optimal mitochondrial function is key to a well-functioning metabolism. Repairing mitochondrial dysfunction offers one of the simplest and most promising new strategies for improving your health and helping prevent diseases like cancer from developing in your body in the first place.
THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF FREE RADICALS IN MITOCHONDRIAL ENERGY PRODUCTION
Every cell in your body needs a continuous supply of energy. Most of that energy is produced by your mitochondria through a process that involves two essential biological functions required to sustain life: breathing and eating. This process is called oxidative phosphorylation, and it is responsible for producing energy in the form of ATP.
(This process is in contrast to cancer cells, which rely more on metabolizing glucose outside of the mitochondria to produce energy in a less efficient process called glycolysis.)
ATP, the “the currency of energy,” drives essentially every biological process in your body, from the function of your brain to the beating of your heart. Your heart has more than 5,000 mitochondria per cell, for example, making it the most energy-dense tissue in your body.
During oxidative phosphorylation, your mitochondria host a complex series of chemical reactions, which can be challenging to understand even for most biochemistry students, called the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain. Combined, these reactions use electrons liberated from the food you eat and protons contained within the cycle to produce energy and keep the process rolling. At the end of the chain, electrons react with oxygen to form water.
A percentage of electrons will leak from the electron transport chain and form what is called reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS are molecules that contain oxygen atoms that have gained one or more unpaired electrons, making them very unstable. These highly reactive atoms form potentially destructive free radicals. You are likely familiar with the term free radicals. You may even believe that they are universally dangerous and supplement with antioxidants to neutralize them. (I will explain why this isn’t necessarily so in just a few moments.)
Free radicals react with other molecules in what are known as oxidation reactions in order to neutralize their unstable electrical charge. Oxidation is essentially “biological rusting.” It creates a snowball effect—as molecules steal electrons from one another, each one becomes a new free radical, leaving behind a trail of biological carnage. This rapidly expanding horde of free radicals collects within the cell and degrades cell and mitochondrial membranes in a process known as lipid peroxidation. When this happens, the membranes become brittle and leaky, causing them to disintegrate.
Free radicals can also damage your DNA by disrupting replication, interfering with its maintenance activities, and altering its structure. Current research estimates that your DNA suffers a free radical attack somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times a day, or nearly one assault every second.3
All of these factors can lead to tissue degradation, which increases your risk of disease. In fact, free radicals are linked to over 60 different diseases, including:
As you can imagine, free radicals have an enormous impact on your health, and the startling fact is that approximately 90 percent or more of the ROS in your body are produced within your mitochondria.
But it is also true that free radicals play a role in health and not just disease. Under normal physiological conditions, they actually play many very valuable roles in your body.
So it’s not that ROS are to be avoided at all costs. It’s not ROS in general that are harmful; it’s ROS in excess that are damaging to your health. The point is you can use MMT to optimize the generation and reduction of ROS in your cells. Think of it as the “Goldilocks phenomenon”: not too much and not too little but “just right” amounts of ROS being made by your healthy mitochondria.
Thus, if you indiscriminately suppress free radicals, you can actually run into complications with the law of unintended consequences. This is why the popular approach to reducing free radicals by loading your body with antioxidant supplements—which can neutralize too many of these free radicals—can easily backfire when they suppress these other important functions of free radicals.
One example of the adverse consequences of excessive antioxidants would be the neutralization of the desirable ROS in cancer cell mitochondria. When these free radicals build up, they cause cancer cells to self-destruct via apoptosis (automatic programmed cell death).
If you have been diagnosed with cancer, check with your licensed health care practitioner about limiting antioxidants including vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, and especially N-acetylcysteine in order to avoid conferring survival advantage to the cancer cells. However, high dose IV vitamin C or oral liposomal C is used by many integrative cancer physicians to treat cancer as the vitamin C turns to hydrogen peroxide, which kills many cancer cells. If your physician does not yet know this molecular biology, perhaps you can suggest they read this chapter to become familiar with this important biological information.
THE DIETARY KEY TO LIMITING FREE RADICALS WITHOUT SUPPLEMENTS
So how can you keep the proper balance of ROS? Fortunately the answer is quite simple. Rather than suppress excessive free radicals with antioxidants, the ideal solution is to produce fewer of them in the first place.
This is why your food choices are so important: the primary benefit of eating a diet high in quality fats, low in net carbs (total carbs minus fiber), and adequate in protein—such as MMT, the eating plan I outline in the second part of this book—is that it optimizes the capacity of your mitochondria to generate a fuel known as ketones that, in conjunction with low blood glucose levels, produces far fewer ROS and secondary free radicals than when you eat primarily carbohydrates.
In other words, carbs can be seen as a far dirtier fuel than fats. When you adopt a low-fat, high-carb diet and make the switch to burning fat and ketones for fuel instead of glucose, your mitochondria’s exposure to oxidative damage drops by as much as 30 to 40 percent compared to when your primary source of fuel is sugar, as is typical in American diets today. This means that when you are “fat adapted”—that is, when you have made the transition to burning fat for fuel—your mitochondrial DNA, cell membranes, and protein can remain stronger, healthier, and more resilient.
In order to regain your body’s ability to burn ketones as your primary fuel, you must focus on increasing your intake of healthy fats and decreasing your consumption of carbs in order to keep your blood glucose levels low. This is what Mitochondrial Metabolic Therapy is engineered to do.
The only catch is that when you replace carbs with fat, you must do it with care. The fats you choose must be high quality and, ideally, organic. But most importantly, they should not be industrially processed omega-6 vegetable oils, for reasons that I’ll cover in just a moment.
You likely realize that espousing a high-fat diet massively contradicts the conventional nutrition guidelines and public health messages of the last half-century. Thankfully that is changing, albeit slowly. But in order to truly empower you to have the courage and knowledge to buck conventional dietary wisdom, we need to look back at how these guidelines became so prevalent. In the next section I will briefly summarize the health crisis that has occurred over the past 70 years in the United States as a direct result of recommendations to consume a low-fat diet.
Let’s start at the beginning of the 20th century.
THE AMERICAN TABLE IN THE EARLY 1900S
In the late 1800s, the majority of Americans were either farmers themselves or lived in rural communities that depended on farmers for their food. There were a few commercially processed foods available: Kellogg’s developed corn flakes in 1898,4 companies such as Heinz, Libby’s, and Campbell’s had been selling canned foods for decades already, and deodorized cottonseed oil—otherwise known as Wesson Oil—came on the market in 1899.5 But the majority of foods on American tables were whole, unprocessed, and locally grown. Interestingly, they were also organic as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides had not yet been introduced.
Cottonseed oil, before appearing in American kitchens in the familiar Wesson bottle, was a waste product of the cotton industry that was used primarily in soap and as fuel for lamps. As electricity became more available and affordable during the first decades of the 20th century, manufacturers had a glut of cottonseed oil on their hands—an ample supply in search of demand.
Cottonseed oil in its natural state is cloudy and has a red tint due to the presence of gossypol, a naturally occurring phytochemical that is toxic to animals, so manufacturers had to develop a deodorizing process to make cottonseed oil palatable as a food product.6 One turn-of-the-century article from Popular Science summed up perfectly the process of taking cottonseed oil from waste bin to table: “What was garbage in 1860 was fertilizer in 1870, cattle feed in 1880, and table food and many things else in 1890.”7
Cottonseed oil wasn’t only unpalatable in its natural state. It came with serious issues due to the fact that it, like nearly all vegetable oils, is a polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), meaning that it has multiple (which is what “poly” means) double bonds between atoms in its molecular structure (meaning the atoms are “unsaturated”). These double bonds are vulnerable to attack by free radicals, which then cause damage to the molecule. When you eat too many PUFAs, they are increasingly incorporated into your cell membranes. Because these fats are unstable, your cells become fragile and prone to oxidation, which leads to all sorts of health problems, such as chronic inflammation and atherosclerosis.
This instability means that vegetable oils are also prone to going rancid. This made them less appealing to food manufacturers because the rise of railroads and refrigeration meant that food could be trucked long distances and sit on shelves for weeks. This is why hydrogenated fats were first heralded as a godsend: they eliminated the vulnerable double bonds and made vegetable oils shelf stable.
In 1907, the Cincinnati-based soap company Procter & Gamble was approached by Edwin Kayser, a German chemist who claimed he had developed a process for making liquid fats solid and shelf stable. The company purchased the U.S. rights to the process and began experimenting, at first in search of a way to make cheaper and more appealing-looking soap.8
Once hydrogenated cottonseed oil was developed, however, P&G realized it had the same luminous white look as lard, the most popular cooking fat at the time. Why not sell it as a cooking fat? In 1910, P&G applied for a patent for Crisco—hydrogenated cottonseed oil, what we know today as a trans fat—and the shift away from animal fats to industrially processed vegetable fats began in earnest.
When Procter & Gamble debuted Crisco in 1911,9 they introduced it to the public as “the ideal fat,” notable for its “purity” and for being “absolutely all vegetable.”10 As a result of these marketing efforts, sales jumped from 2.6 million pounds in 1912 to 60 million pounds four years later.11
Where the average American consumed just under 9 pounds of industrially processed fats—from margarine and vegetable oil—a year in 1909, that number would zoom to about 20 pounds per year by 1950, 15 of them from hydrogenated oils and 5 from vegetable oils.12 All manner of oils, including those derived from soybeans and corn, were hydrogenated and sold in the form of Crisco, margarine, and a variety of packaged, frozen, and fried foods.
As we began consuming more omega-6 vegetable oils than ever before in human history, three other technological developments further changed the nature of the food we ate: synthetic fertilizers, food additives, and pesticides—primarily Roundup.
They also made it possible for farmers to focus on growing only one or two crops—such as corn and soy—instead of the traditional method of rotating through a large number of different crops in an effort stave off soil depletion. This is yet another way the growing supply of vegetable oils created a demand for them.
It also created a loophole: any additive that was “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS) by the scientific community or was in widespread use in food before 1958 could be added to food products without first being approved by, or even disclosed to, the FDA. Still today, with an estimated 10,000 chemicals commonly used in the food supply, there are at least 1,000 that the FDA has never reviewed.14
Even additives that do not make the GRAS list are often exempt from scientific scrutiny, as the FDA allows companies to perform their own studies. One of the most egregious examples of an unsafe additive that the food industry preemptively declared safe is trans fats. We now know trans fats are a prime driver of inflammation and are linked to increases in heart disease,15 insulin resistance,16 obesity,17 and Alzheimer’s disease.18
It makes you wonder what else is on that list, doesn’t it?
There are two main ways glyphosate damages your mitochondria:
Glyphosate binds manganese and many other important minerals in plants sprayed with Roundup, with the result that a creature that eats the plants will not get the benefit of these minerals.
Glyphosate can also bind to and deplete these minerals from your body. This is a problem because your mitochondria require manganese to convert superoxide, a potentially harmful by-product of oxygen metabolism, into water. This is a critical process that protects your mitochondria from oxidative damage. Without manganese, this mechanism is severely compromised.
SATURATED FAT BECOMES THE ENEMY
What’s interesting is that despite manufacturers’ claims that refined vegetable oils were healthful, Americans experienced a massive uptick in heart disease during the first half of the 20th century. And although these oils were a new introduction to the food supply, no one thought to question their role in this new epidemic. Rather, a familiar and previously ubiquitous nutrient took the blame, mostly due to the haphazard and apparently biased research of one man.
Our decades-long mortal fear of fat was born in 1951, when an American physiology professor named Ancel Keys went to Europe in search of the root of heart disease. Keys had heard that Naples, Italy, had a low rate of cardiovascular disease, so he went to observe the eating habits of the Neapolitans.
Remember that Europe had been decimated during World War II—all manner of infrastructure had been destroyed during fighting—and for many years after peace was proclaimed, famine conditions existed. These conditions were the worst and most persistent in Greece and Italy, which had the least amount of food per capita in all of Europe, according to a 1951 survey. These were the finite and unusual circumstances that Keys waltzed into, which he perceived as long-standing tradition that he would eventually codify into “the Mediterranean Diet.”
In Naples, Keys noticed that residents dined primarily on pasta and plain pizza, accompanied by vegetables drizzled in olive oil, cheese, fruit for dessert, plenty of wine, and very little meat, “except among the small class of rich people . . . they ate meat every day instead of every week or two,” he wrote.
Keys’s wife, a medical technologist, conducted an informal study on the Neapolitans’ serum levels of cholesterol and “found them to be very low except among members of the Rotary Club”—the class of people who could afford to eat meat. This less-than-rigorous scientific approach led Keys to deduce that avoiding meat resulted in a lower incidence of heart attacks; somehow the prevalence of cheese in the diet (also a source of saturated fat) escaped his notice, but he would soon prove himself skilled at ignoring evidence that didn’t confirm his biases.21
After Italy, Keys continued looking for proof that a diet high in saturated fat was associated with a high rate of cardiovascular disease, compiling data from six countries with high rates of heart disease and diets typically high in saturated fats.22 The evidence seemed compelling, logical even. For instance, men in America—who ate a diet high in saturated fat—died from cardiovascular disease at a much higher rate than men in Japan, who ate little saturated fat.
But the evidence was skewed. Keys didn’t include other facts, such as that the Japanese also ate far less sugar and processed foods; in fact, they ate far less food in general than their contemporaries. Keys also didn’t include countries that didn’t fit his mold, such as France, where consumption of saturated fat was high and cardiovascular deaths low. (Instead, this finding was later described as “the French Paradox.”) Still, his ideas gained traction as he published numerous papers and best-selling books espousing a link between saturated fats and degenerative heart disease.
Keys was also a master at ingratiating himself to people and positions of power. When President Eisenhower had a massive heart attack in 1955, Keys had the ear of Paul Dudley White, the president’s personal physician. At the following day’s news conference, White advised the public to eat less saturated fat and cholesterol to prevent heart disease—recommendations he got directly from Keys.23
Keys also used his connections and influence to join the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association (AHA), which, based on Keys’s input, issued a report in 1961 that counseled patients with a high risk of heart disease to cut down on saturated fat.24 (It’s distressing to note that the AHA began its rise to prominence in 1948, the same year Procter & Gamble donated over $1.7 million to it25—making the AHA seriously indebted to the makers of Crisco.)
Nineteen sixty-one was also the year Time magazine put Keys on its cover wearing a white lab coat, hailing him as “the twentieth century’s most influential nutrition expert.”
In 1970, Keys went on to publish the Seven Countries Study,26 which elaborated on his original research of six countries, and it was a shot heard round the world—it has now been cited in over a million other studies. Even though Keys’s scientific research never proved causation, only association, between saturated fat and heart disease, he won the battle of public opinion. And we are still paying the price.
Thanks in large part to Keys, the American medical community and mainstream media began advising people to stop consuming the butter, lard, and bacon they’d been eating for centuries, replacing them with bread, pasta, margarine, low-fat dairy, and vegetable oil. It was a dietary shift that was ultimately codified by the U.S. government in the late 1970s.
HOW NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES HAVE DECIMATED PUBLIC HEALTH
In 1977, the U.S. released the first national dietary guidelines to urge Americans to cut back on fat intake.27 In a radical departure from the prevailing diet of the time, the guidelines suggested Americans eat a diet high in grains and low in fat, with industrially processed vegetables oils taking the place of most animal fats.
According to research by Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D., published in the journal Open Heart, there was never any scientific basis for the recommendations to cut fat from the U.S. diet.28 Dr. Harcombe and colleagues examined the evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—the gold standard of scientific research—available to the U.S. and U.K. regulatory committees at the time the guidelines were implemented. Six dietary trials involving 2,467 men were available, but there were no differences in all-cause mortality and only nonsignificant differences in heart-disease mortality resulting from the dietary interventions.
As noted in Open Heart, “Recommendations were made for 276 million people following secondary studies of 2467 males, which reported identical all-cause mortality. RCT evidence did not support the introduction of dietary fat guidelines.”
Despite the lack of evidence to support them, the guidelines were quite extreme, calling for Americans to reduce overall fat consumption to 30 percent of total energy intake and limit saturated fat consumption to just 10 percent of total energy. The war on fat was on, and it has prevailed to this day: even as recently as December 2015, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its most recent nutritional guidelines, cautions on saturated fat were still strongly worded, with Americans advised to “consume less than 10 percent of calories per day from saturated fats.”29
In all these years, that very recommendation has actually fueled the problem it aimed to treat. No one knows for sure just how many premature deaths have resulted from this low-fat diet recommendation, but my guess is that this number is easily into the hundreds of millions.
THE LOW DIETARY FAT EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN A MISERABLE FAILURE
Ever since Ancel Keys catalyzed the shift to a low-fat diet in the 1950s, Americans have dutifully reduced their intake of animal fats. The pace of the change picked up following the introduction of the USDA Dietary Guidelines in 1980 and the subsequent retooling of the food industry to produce low-fat foods, replacing healthy saturated fats like butter and lard with harmful trans fats, industrially processed vegetable oils, and lots of refined sugar. (Food manufacturers needed some way to make their products more crave-worthy despite the absence of the luscious taste of butter and lard, so they turned to ever-increasing amounts of sugar, which appears in a myriad of processed foods.)
Yet despite adherence to these supposedly “healthy” guidelines, U.S. public health has declined precipitously, as evidenced by trends in the following areas:
In 1978, 5.19 million Americans had been diagnosed with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control. By 2013, it was 22.3 million—more than quadruple the number of people diagnosed with this deadly disease in just 35 years.30
According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, from 1976 to 1980, 16.4 percent of adults were obese (defined as a BMI over 30) or extremely obese (BMI over 35). The latest numbers available at the time of this writing, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, put that total at more than 45.6 percent obese or extremely obese.31 Whereas in the 1970s only one in about six people was obese, now nearly one out of two adults are afflicted.
Obesity is a major risk factor in many cancers. In 1975, the rate of new cancer diagnoses was roughly 400 people out of every 100,000;32 the estimated number of new cases of cancer in 2016 was nearly 449 people out of every 100,000—a statistically significant increase.33
Heart disease is also associated with obesity. Death rates from heart disease have declined since their peak in the 1950s, although much of this is due to advances in medical treatment, not improvements in health. The prevalence of heart disease is still high, and headed higher: In 2010, approximately 36.9 percent of Americans were living with some form of cardiovascular disease, and the rates are expected to keep rising. A study published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, projects that by 2030, over 40 percent of the U.S. population will be living with cardiovascular disease.34
Once you understand the differences in how your body metabolizes sugars as opposed to fats, you will be able to follow the money to get a clear picture of how these flawed guidelines have contributed to this huge decline in public health.
Remember, your body is designed to run much more efficiently on fats than on sugar. By eating more sugar and nonfiber carbs, which rapidly convert to sugar, you generate far more tissue-damaging free radicals than when you are primarily burning fat for fuel. Although free radicals do confer some important health benefits, when you overconsume sugar and nonfiber carbs you tip the balance of free radicals in your body in an unhealthy direction. This imbalance then creates a cascade of tissue, protein, cell membrane, and genetic damage, paving the way for inflammation and disease.
It’s not just physical health that has been hurt by the war on saturated fat. For decades now, Americans have been counseled by the government, their doctors, and the mainstream media that all they need to do to lose weight and be healthy is to eat less—particularly less saturated fat—and exercise more. The reality is that eating low-fat and high-carb foods makes it extremely difficult to lose weight.
In simple terms, when you eat carbohydrates, your pancreas secretes insulin. And the more insulin you have in your blood, the more signals your body gets to store fat. In other words, by following the present dietary advice that was officially codified by the government in 1977, we as a nation have been doing the very things that cause us to gain weight and keep it on.
So if you’ve gamely followed the USDA’s nutritional guidelines and started loading up on bread, fat-free cereals, and skim milk while also hitting the gym a few times a week, and your excess weight not only hasn’t budged but has increased, well, whose fault is that? According to all the conventional sources of nutritional guidance, the fault is yours.
The assumption is that you must not have been trying hard enough, or you weren’t doing it right. Of course, this is demoralizing. One of my primary intentions in creating MMT and writing this book is to show you that you absolutely do have the power to lose weight and restore your own health.
WHAT DOES THE SCIENCE SAY?
The ubiquitous story line in the media and the governmental public health agencies hasn’t evolved much past Ancel Keys’s observations in the early 1950s: avoid saturated fats because they raise your LDL cholesterol, which will ultimately clog your arteries and lead to heart disease.
The problem with this recommendation is that it’s based only on a hypothesis, and worse yet, that hypothesis has never been proven. In fact, numerous studies over the decades have carefully examined the supposed link between saturated fats and heart disease and found it flawed.
Six major clinical trials on saturated fat have been used to support the assumption that saturated fats cause heart disease. In reality, however, none of them actually showed that eating fewer saturated fats would prevent heart disease and lengthen your life. In fact, none of these trials showed that restricting saturated fats reduced total mortality:
More recently, three meta-analyses that collectively included data on hundreds of thousands of people have found that there is no difference in the risks of heart disease and stroke between people with the lowest and highest intakes of fat.41, 42, 43 (Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for combining the findings from a selection of independent studies.)
And some research has found that replacing saturated animal fats with industrially processed omega-6 vegetable fats is linked to an increased risk of death among patients with heart disease. A British Medical Journal study published in 201344 included 458 men with a history of heart problems who were divided into two groups. One group reduced saturated fats to less than 10 percent of their energy intake and increased omega-6 fats from safflower oils to 15 percent of their energy intake. The control group continued to eat whatever they wanted. After 39 months:
Another study published in the British Medical Journal in 201345 found that replacing saturated animal fats with industrially processed omega-6 vegetable fats is linked to an increased risk of death among patients with heart disease.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SATURATED FAT
Part of the enormous confusion about the dangers associated with saturated fats is related to their effect on LDL cholesterol, often referred to as “bad” cholesterol. But it’s important to understand that when you hear the terms LDL and HDL, they’re both referring to lipoproteins, which are simply proteins that carry cholesterol. LDL stands for low-density lipoprotein, while HDL stands for high-density lipoprotein.
HDL cholesterol is actually linked to a lower risk of heart disease, which is why measurements of total cholesterol are useless when it comes to measuring your risk. In fact, if your total cholesterol is “high” because you have a lot of HDL, it’s no indication of increased heart risks; rather, it’s likely protective.
Saturated fats have been shown to actually raise protective HDL cholesterol while also increasing LDL. The latter isn’t necessarily bad either once you understand that there are different types of LDL:
Research has confirmed that large, fluffy LDL particles do not contribute to heart disease. The small, dense LDL particles, however, are easily oxidized, which may trigger heart disease. This is because the small, dense LDL penetrates your arterial wall more easily, so it contributes to the buildup of plaque in your arteries. Synthetic trans fat also increases small, dense LDL. Saturated fat, on the other hand, increases large, fluffy—and benign—LDL.
People with high levels of small, dense LDL have triple the heart disease risk of people with high levels of large, fluffy LDL.46 And here’s another fact that might blow your mind: eating saturated fat may change the small, dense LDL in your body into the healthier large, fluffy LDL!47, 48 Also important, research has shown that small, dense LDL particles are increased by eating refined sugar and carbohydrates, such as bread, bagels and soda.49 Together, refined sugar and carbs do far more harm to your body than saturated fat ever could.
Based on what we know now about saturated fats, the irony is that they are actually necessary to promote health and prevent disease. Indeed, it’s now known that saturated fats provide a number of important health benefits, including the following:
The research has spelled out loud and clear that saturated fats are beneficial for human health. Most of us need to radically increase the healthy fat in our diet—this includes not only saturated fat but also monounsaturated fats (from avocados and certain nuts) and omega-3 fats—while severely limiting refined vegetable oils and even naturally occurring omega-6 fats (found in nuts and seeds).
If this sounds like a lot to remember, just hold on to this: for optimal health, eat real food—this means plenty of saturated fats and little to no refined fats, especially refined vegetable oils. Again, I will cover diet specifics in much more detail in Part II of this book.