"Saturated fat does not cause heart
disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal
Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of
dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in
butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our
arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature
to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter. The
new study's conclusion shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with modern
nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid
evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe
this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the
past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science,
politics and bias. Our distrust of
saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel
Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was
formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top
of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for
relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol
and, as a result, cause heart attacks. This idea fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a
fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades
earlier, had quickly become the nation's No. 1 killer. Even President
Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were
desperate for answers...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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