sat fat irrelevant?

[dteresa]

I think Pritikin was one hundred percent plant no fat but in order to get people to eat his diet he added a pound and a half of animal food per week. Maybe he said that in the interview with dr. Mcd But I am not sure.

If there is someone who has been eating like the okinawans from birth then eating the amount of animal food those on their traditional diet ate you would be eating about 17 pounds of fish per year or less than an ounce per day and about nine pounds of pork per year which amounts to less than half an ounce per day.

Rural Chinese farmers who live to 85 and who have been autopsied have been shown to have only a 20% blockage (I am guessing on average) even on a diet which must have been very very low on animal foods. That number isn't 0.

So I am guessing that anyone who spent years on the SAD is taking a chance on "just a little bit " of animal food. And you are right. What constitutes a little bit and will people stick to that little bit?

[bbq]

They were able to eat a little bit because of the availability in general, raising animals back then should be considered a luxury and they had to keep those animals around for other purposes as well. That's why the slaughtering wouldn't happen unless it's a feast for special occasions. Maybe no refrigeration (yet?) since many of them might not have access to something relatively sophisticated.

Now the costs of raising animals are so easily externalized to the environment, to our health, and the tax dollars because of subsidies. It's almost "stupid" not to fool around with factory farming when most consumers are totally clueless about what's going on behind the scenes. Even the so-called "free range" stuff would be laughable at best and let's see how many omnivores could actually afford the "better" grass-fed premium products.

It's just so difficult to compare the mechanical food system right now with the biological food system back then. Certainly nothing like apples to apples but Apple to Samsung could be close enough.

And then I still can't stress enough how unintelligent it is to eat anything that's (relatively) high in the food chain these days. We just didn't have that much pollution in the Agricultural Age and pretty much everyone knew what really happened since the Industrial Age. The bioaccumulation and biomagnification won't do us a favor thanks to our environmental toxins.

We didn't even to think about organic shopping when everything was organic to boot, we just weren't greedy enough to put those nasty chemicals in the environment. No need to update the list of dirty dozen and clean fifteen on a regular basis. And we didn't figure out how to play God by taking genes from one species to another.



Personally it's just so difficult for my own life to have anything to do with animal products. Grains could have been fed to someone in the developing world but they couldn't afford the rising prices as a result of ever increasing demand of feeding animals in developed nations. We're essentially killing ourselves with foods, killing animals in factory farms, and killing the poor with starvation.

[snapple]

Really great discussion. Minor confusion / thing:

So if you substitute say, olive or canola oil for butter or lard, you'll improve your heart health by reducing the constant irritation to your blood vessels"

I would have thought that butter and lard were worse not better? They are harder at room temperature, no?

Regards, snapple

[christianvegan]

One thing I was afraid to give up was coconut oil because I had heard that the medium chain triglycerides in it were good for the myelin sheathing of our nerve cells as well as, it is claimed, help escort bad fats out of our blood vessels. Most have heard about anecdotal reports of autistic children, people with epilepsy and alzhiemers getting better with addition of coconut oil in their diet.

Well, I don't know about the validity of all that, or the science, but what I DO know is that since I stopped cooking with that and olive oil, and stopped eating processed and restaurant foods with oil (mostly-occasionally in the last two weeks I've had a few corn chips) I am losing weight and my blood circulation is better-no more intensely cold feet and hands, and my brain is working better. For what its worth.....

[Katydid]

Really great discussion. Minor confusion / thing:

So if you substitute say, olive or canola oil for butter or lard, you'll improve your heart health by reducing the constant irritation to your blood vessels"

I would have thought that butter and lard were worse not better? They are harder at room temperature, no?

Regards, snapple

Right. If you substitute olive oil for lard your reduce irritation to the blood vessels. Isn't that what I said?

[snapple]

quite right, duh, sorry

[Spiral]

I like this thread because I have relatives who applauded Denise Minger for her blog posts criticizing the conclusions of "The China Study," by Campbell and Campbell.

But I am sure they would also applaud this argument that saturated fat isn't bad for you. I am amazed how healthy my relatives look even as they eat 3 eggs fried in bacon grease each morning and grass fed beef many days of the week.

Who needs scientific studies published in medical journals when I have a clinical trial going on in my extended family: me on a low-fat, whole foods plant based diet and some of my relatives on a paleo diet.

Still, I tend to agree with Jeff Novick's take on saturated fat. It is both a marker of unhealthful eating and an unhealthful constituent of food.

[misterE]

It is interesting to note that back in 1909, the American Diet consisted of starch, saturated-fat (butter) and plant-protein, while today it mainly consists of sugar, polyunsaturated-fat (soybean-oil) and animal-protein.


Another way of looking at this would be to say that in 1909, the American diet was low in essential-amino-acids and low in essential-fatty-acids... which is the exact opposite of today.

[Spiral]

Here is a study conducted by the Beef Checkoff through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. They used 2 different low-carb diets. One was made to be higher in saturated fat than the other diet by adding lots of full fat dairy.

Changes in Atherogenic Dyslipidemia Induced by Carbohydrate Restriction in Men Are Dependent on Dietary Protein Source

Dietary saturated fat content was derived primarily from dairy foods in both studies. Beef fat was only a minor component of the saturated fat profiles of the LCHSF and LCLSF diets and there was only a 0.6% differential in saturated beef fat intake between these two diets. Hence, the present findings suggest an interaction between saturated fat and one or more nonfat components of beef on lipoprotein metabolism. Because there is little evidence for a major role of dietary protein composition on lipoprotein metabolism, this interaction is not likely to be caused by specific amino acids within beef protein. However, saturated fat might be interacting with a micronutrient or other component that is more abundant in beef than in other food protein sources. For example, systemic iron stores have been associated with altered lipid metabolism and there is evidence that heme iron absorption is substantially increased by saturated fat and, in particular, stearic acid, which is abundant in dairy fat.

I found this in this video by Plant Positive.