Authors: Mary Enig
A Cautionary Note
There are no side effects from adding coconut products to your diet unless you are allergic to coconut. Even if you are, you can still probably take coconut oil, because the allergenic components of coconut are protein compounds found in the meat of the coconut, not in the oil. In that case, follow the Eat Fat, Lose Fat plans by using just the Traditional Recipes in Chapter 10 and taking coconut oil before meals in warm water or herb tea.
Did You Know…?
All three plans incorporate healthy fats into the diet in four ways:
This unique combination of diet components is designed to support thyroid function. Boosting your thyroid initiates a domino effect, revving up your energy levels, speeding up your metabolic system, burning more calories per day, and sparking weight loss.
Margaret’s Story: Cellulite Disappeared
Margaret is a thin, very active young mother who takes pride in her youthful figure. So she was upset when she developed cellulite on her thighs. Even regular swimming did not help, and she was too thin to lose weight. Then she started using coconut oil along with other traditional fats, while eliminating all commercial vegetable oils and trans fats from her diet. Within a year, her cellulite disappeared.
On all three food plans, you will use precise amounts of coconut and cod-liver oil (rich in thyroid-supportive vitamin A), along with other complementary foods to provide an optimal blend of fats and oils that boost metabolism and keep hunger at bay. Our calorie-restricted weight-loss plan shows you the exact number of calories per serving.
In Search of Nutritional Balance
How can we be ahead of the curve with this cutting-edge healthy fats program? Our work at the Weston A. Price Foundation is based on the pioneering research of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist who traveled the world as far back as the 1930s, studying and documenting the effects of both traditional and modern diets and identifying foods that produced enduring health, generation after generation (see sidebar). We’ve pored over the science and studied the foods eaten by healthy societies all over the world. Through our research and cross-cultural investigation, we’ve rediscovered the important role fats play in healthy nutrition. And through our website, westonaprice.org., our magazine,
Wise Traditions
, and over 200 local chapters, we have reached a wide network of people who have experienced the health benefits of traditional foods. Hundreds of people have followed the nutritional program you’ll find in this book to achieve (and maintain) their optimal weight and to regain their energy, hormonal balance, and zest for life. Our program is effective in boosting energy and enhancing metabolism because we know the science!
In our bestselling cookbook,
Nourishing Traditions
(New Trends, 2000), we focused extensively on the foods and culinary techniques found by Dr. Price to support health. In
Eat Fat, Lose Fat
, we’ll show you easy ways to use traditional natural ingredients and age-old culinary techniques. In his work, Price found that similar foods and preparation techniques evolved in many different cultures to provide the right kind of nutrients, prepared in a way that the human body could absorb. This is the foundation of the dietary program we’ll offer in
Eat Fat, Lose Fat
, with a special emphasis on coconut oil and other healthy fats because of their unique ability to boost metabolism, build energy, and nurture health. The traditional foods our program uses are not unfamiliar: they’re much like the scrumptious meals your grandmother used to make.
Who Was Weston A. Price?
In 1932, Dr. Price, a Cleveland dentist, launched a unique investigation. He had grown increasingly concerned about the declining health of his patients. Observing rampant tooth decay and crowded and crooked teeth, he noted that people with these dental problems invariably suffered from other health problems as well. Price believed that these problems were not hereditary but nutritional. He was skeptical that the diets his patients were consuming, based on sugar, white flour, and vegetable oils, could support good health.
Having heard that isolated peoples consuming only local foods had excellent dental health, Price spent over ten years traveling to remote parts of the globe to study the health of populations untouched by Western civilization in order to discover whether nonindustrialized peoples indeed were healthy and, if so, what were they eating?
He visited sequestered villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, indigenous peoples of North and South America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, and New Zealand Maori. In all, Price found 14 population groups that enjoyed beautiful, straight teeth free from decay, as well as fine physiques and resistance to disease, so long as they ate their traditional diets, which were rich in certain essential food factors.
On the other hand, whenever these traditional peoples began to eat devitalized Western foods, which Price called “the displacing foods of modern commerce,” physical degeneration ensued. Health problems showed up immediately, and structural defects (namely, narrow jaws and crooked teeth) appeared in the next generation. Not surprisingly, widespread obesity often accompanied the transition to modern processed foods.
You’ll find the whys, hows, and whats of healthy fat consumption in
Eat Fat, Lose Fat
’s three parts.
In Part 1, you’ll learn why you should be eating traditional fats, why they are healthy, and why you’ve been told they aren’t. Chapter 2 presents the history and science behind the anti-fat campaign, showing you how a different interpretation of the data leads to a totally different conclusion about fats. Chapter 3 explains in more depth why your body needs fats, and particularly why the kinds of fats you’ll enjoy on our program are healthier than others. Chapter 4 provides the foundations of our nutritional philosophy and applies it to weight loss.
What Do We Mean by Traditional Foods?
We’re talking about real foods: butter, cream, raw milk cheeses, steak, lamb chops, bacon and patés without additives, and hearty soups made with real stock. “Traditional” means the type of foods nonindustrialized peoples ate: foods in their natural, unprocessed form, from unconfined animals that feed on pasture. In our recipe section, you’ll also learn traditional preparation methods, including fermentation, that make grains and vegetables healthier and easier to digest. You’ll even learn how to make healthy soft drinks.
Hardship food? Hardly. These are all the basics you already know and love, plus new techniques that enhance digestion and absorption of nutrients.
In Part 2 you’ll learn how to follow our program. Chapter 5 offers complete information about the traditional foods you’ll learn to enjoy. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 present our three diet plans: Quick and Easy Weight Loss, Health Recovery, and Everyday Gourmet, each with a complete menu plan. In Part 3: Recipes and Resources, Chapter 9 presents those based on coconut, while the recipes in Chapter 10 show you how to prepare a variety of wholesome, traditional foods. Finally, our ample Resources section helps you locate sources of the products we recommend, explains the differences between brands, and offers a special treat: a list of coconut oil recipes for removing wrinkles, treating acne, and creating lustrous, smooth skin.
Right now, let’s look further into one particular assertion about saturated fat: the charge that it’s responsible for heart disease. Chapter 2 will show you otherwise—and also tell the story of the well-orchestrated campaign to hide the truth about saturated and trans fats from the American public.
We’ve seen thousands of Westerners dramatically upgrade their health by adopting a time-honored traditional diet while, on the other hand, traditional peoples who have abandoned that diet in favor of modern oils have experienced radical health
declines,
according to recent studies. For example, Indians experienced a dramatic increase in heart disease as they urbanized, according to an article in the
Journal of the Indian Medical Association
, 2000. The most likely reason? Their adoption of Western foods, especially switching to vegetable oils instead of using traditional ghee (clarified butter) for cooking.
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 Americans 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 wasn’t 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. At long last, nutritional experts around the country agree and have called for a revision of the USDA Food Pyramid, which promotes excess consumption of the
real
culprits. (Although the new USDA guidelines do contain warnings about trans fats, they still condemn saturated fats.)
Let us repeat:
the very oils promoted as healthy
in place of saturated fats were, in fact,
accessories
(along with refined grains and sweets) to this nation’s mounting weight gain and key contributors to heart disease. Recent research reveals that it is the polyunsaturated vegetable oils,
not
the saturated fats in coconut oil and animal foods, that
induce
changes leading to heart disease. For example, the work of Bernard Hennig, published in the
Journal of the American College of Nutrition
, 2001, indicates that an excess of omega-6 fatty acids (from commercial vegetable oils) contributes to pathological changes in the cells lining the arteries, and hence to heart disease. There is also much research demonstrating that the trans fats in many manufactured foods (the same foods people eat to avoid saturated fats) contribute to a wide range of illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and obesity.
In particular, the entire ideology behind the indictment of saturated fats for increasing cholesterol, and cholesterol for causing arteriosclerosis, is faulty. But don’t just take our word for it. To ensure that you feel comfortable following our healthy-fat, coconut-rich diet plans, this chapter will continue your “fats education” by laying out the history of the connection mistakenly made between saturated fats and heart disease,
and
explain why you never knew these facts until now.
We’ll begin by examining the following core questions:
Next, we’ll explain how we came to accept the theory that there’s a link between saturated fats, cholesterol, and heart disease. This second part of the story is not scientific but historic, as we go back to the early 20th century to trace the evolution of the “lipid hypothesis,” a theory that scientists held sacred for decades but are finally beginning to question as more and more contradictory evidence appears.
The Anti-Fat Campaign
The term “lipid hypothesis”—the theory that saturated fats and cholesterol in our food raise cholesterol levels in the blood, leading to heart disease—was coined in the 1950s by Ancel Keys, author of several epidemiological studies that, although in our opinion were severely flawed, are frequently quoted as supporting the theory that animal fats cause heart disease. (Another term, the “Diet-Heart Idea,” was used by Dr. George Mann, who had participated in an important long-term study and became highly critical of the hypothesis.) This theory is so prevalent, so widely believed, and so fundamental to the modern treatment of cardiovascular illness, that up until now you’ve probably never heard that it is only
one
theory of heart disease, and that a different reading of the data, along with volumes of other research, supports a very different conclusion: that saturated fats do not contribute to heart disease and in fact actually protect us against this and many other diseases.
The lipid hypothesis grew out of scientists’ attempts to grapple with a steep rise in heart disease, from less than 10 percent of all deaths at the turn of the 20th century to 30 percent of all deaths by 1950 (and almost 45 percent of all deaths today). Even more disturbing, most of the increase was due to a new phenomenon, myocardial infarction (MI) or heart attack, which did not exist before the 1920s. During the 1950s, Dr. Dudley White, the most famous cardiologist of his day (he was President Eisenhower’s physician), noted that heart disease had increased as the consumption of liquid vegetable oils increased and the consumption of eggs and traditional fats like butter and lard declined. The use of margarine quadrupled, and that of vegetable oils more than tripled, between 1900 and 1950, while egg consumption declined by half.
What’s more, after World War II, manufacturers began hydrogenating these liquid oils so that they could be used as a substitute for coconut oil and animal fats in baked goods. Thus more and more Americans were consuming products like Wesson Oil and Crisco, processed fats that had never been part of the human diet before. And these processed fats were being used in more and more processed products containing refined carbohydrates and many additives that gave them a long shelf life.
Dr. White and many others pointed out that these facts—heart disease increasing along with the use of polyunsaturated oils and partially hydrogenated oils in processed foods—suggested that Americans should eat traditional foods like meat, eggs, butter and cheese, and avoid the vegetable oil–based foods newly flooding the grocers’ shelves. But other scientists suggested instead that
reducing
animal foods in the diet was the way to keep the heart healthy. They cited studies by a young researcher named David Kritchevsky, who discovered that feeding large amounts of purified cholesterol caused a type of atherosclerosis (a buildup of fatty plaques on the inner walls of arteries) in vegetarian rabbits.
By the early 1970s, the lipid hypothesis had become the ruling explanation for the rise in heart disease, accepted and promoted by leading medical experts such as Dr. Frederick Stare, head of Harvard University’s Nutrition Department, respected organizations including the American Heart Association, government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and of course the food manufacturers, especially the edible oil industry. (In fact, we have documented evidence that the edible oil industry worked behind the scenes to influence government policy to endorse the use of foods containing their products, and not traditional fats.)
What Is the Lipid Hypothesis, and How Has It Affected What You Eat?
In coronary heart disease (CHD), a buildup of fatty plaques in the artery walls causes a narrowing of the coronary arteries (which bring blood to the heart), leading to blockage of the blood flow to the heart. The result is angina (chest pain) and, often, heart attack. The lipid hypothesis describes coronary heart disease as a three-step disease process:
•
Step 1:
We eat a diet containing too much cholesterol and saturated fat, and as a result we develop a high level of cholesterol in our blood.
•
Step 2:
High blood cholesterol causes atherosclerosis.
•
Step 3:
Atherosclerosis obstructs the vessels that bring blood to the heart, resulting in coronary heart disease.
Each of these steps is like a link in a chain, connecting to form the lipid hypothesis. And yet extensive scientific evidence exists that contradicts each step in this “chain” of scientific theory, presented as fact for over five decades. This evidence has been around for years, but for various reasons—described by Dr. Mann as “reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice”—the media and the scientific community have not communicated this fact to the public.
Spokespersons from organizations promoting the lipid hypothesis don’t understand the effects and benefits of dietary saturated fats (described in Chapter 1), nor do they comprehend the normal presence within the body of saturated fats—and their key role. Fundamentally, the war on saturated fats stems from a misperception about the effects of saturated fatty acids on cholesterol levels.
What
Is
Cholesterol?
Cholesterol is often referred to as a fat, but it’s actually a heavyweight alcohol with a hormonelike structure that behaves like a fat, being insoluble in water and in blood. Cholesterol, however, has a coating of a compound called a lipoprotein, which makes it water soluble so it can be carried in the blood.
Lipoproteins are described in terms of their density. Generally speaking, high-density lipoproteins (HDL) carry cholesterol away from the cells to the liver, and low-density lipoproteins (LDL) carry cholesterol to the cells. We speak of HDL as “good” cholesterol and LDL as “bad” cholesterol. However, both HDL and LDL play critical roles in body chemistry.
The Benefits of Cholesterol
And, although there has been much alarm about cholesterol levels, in fact, the cholesterol found naturally in animal fats has many important functions (see sidebar).
We’ll begin our critique of the lipid hypothesis by exploding four myths about the connection between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease.
*
Myth #1: High-Fat Foods Cause Heart Disease
Since the 1950s, scientists, medical organizations such as the American Heart Association, and government agencies such as the FDA have issued dietary guidelines, which they claimed were based on scientific research, urging the public to consume fewer animal products and substitute vegetable oils for animal fats. The food industry followed suit with advertising campaigns touting the health benefits of products low in fat or made with vegetable oils.
Yet during the same time period, many studies were being carried out whose results directly contradicted the assumptions of the lipid hypothesis. Here is a selection of three such studies.
The Masai of Kenya
In the early 1960s, Dr. George Mann of Vanderbilt University studied the Masai people, cattle herders of Kenya whose diet consisted almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood. The Masai drank at least a gallon of milk per day, providing something like three-quarters of a pound of butterfat daily, and at festivals one person might eat four to ten pounds of meat!
Not only did Dr. Mann discover the Masai to be virtually free of heart disease; their blood cholesterol was extremely low, about 50 percent lower than that of most Americans. When Dr. Mann studied 50 hearts and arteries from Masai tribesmen of all ages, he found as much atherosclerosis as in those of Americans. However, the types of plaques that caused obstruction (by sticking out of the vessel walls) were rare. In fact, he found no evidence that any of the 50 hearts had experienced a heart attack.