Dr. McDougall's Online Discussion Board

http://nutritionstudies.org/low-carb-hot-air/

here is an article I found on dr. Campbell's website, written by Tom Campbell and posted to Jeff asking about it. Tom Campbell said he agrees with the low carbers about sat fat not being proven to cause heart, cancer and other degenerative diseases but it is the association of sat fat with animal protein and the animal protein causes the problem. In fact, in the China Study doctor Campbell says animal protein tracks more with cancer than fats.

Yet on the same website, Dr. Matt Lederman has an article about the dangers of Coconut oil saying it is not a health food specifically because it contains saturated fat. It is not associated with animal protein. Nor are seed oils. So other than causing weight gain, are there health reasons after all for not eating fats?

It looks to me like there are two differing opinions here.

didi

This particular page about MCTs found in coconut oil looked legit but we never know:

http://nutritionreview.org/2013/04/medium-chain-triglycerides-mcts/

It's still fantastic for topical use so that no more sunscreen loaded with toxic chemicals for me. Also great for homemade lotion as well as massage oil.

When it comes to food choices, I don't wanna spend my money on something so heavily processed and energy intensive to manufacture in the first place. Probably a good idea to stick with simple meals without having to mess with that stuff.

Sometimes we just can't tell what they're doing with oil these days. Majority of extra-virgin olive oil should be fake to begin with, and don't even get us started with the infamous gutter oil in Asia. The quality (or lack thereof) could be questionable at best, something supposedly healthful could be turned into fatal whenever someone was trying to make a quick buck.

and also Jeff has answered very well on his board.

didi

I wish I could find the link to where I learned this (I think it was in Dr. Klaper's "Foods that Kill" video), but you can think of a fully saturated (hydrogenated) fat like a straight inflexible stick. As it flows through the bloodstream the stiffness of the molecule causes it to "poke" at the lining of the blood vessels and cause irritation. A mono or polyunsaturated fat has missing hydrogen atoms that allow the fat molecule to flex, so it causes less damage as it flows through the bloodstream. 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"

One the other hand, the more unsaturated a fat, the more likely that the oil will undergo oxidation (go rancid) and form free radicals. So you increase your risk of cancer as you decrease your risk of heart disease. Better to avoid consuming isolated fats altogether.

Kate

Another study from India:

Various studies, including our own works have shown that coconut oil does not increase serum cholesterol level. The major fat in mother’s milk is the same lauric acid as in coconut oil. Baby foods all over the world do contain lauric acid (that from coconut oil) as the prominent ingredient. The plaques in the diseased coronary arteries contain mainly long chain fatty acids (seen in other oils) and not medium chain fatty acids (of coconut oil); and this is the same irrespective of whether one takes sunflower oil or coconut oil. All these findings indicate that coconut oil is neutral with respect to atherogenicity (plaque formation and eventual heart attack). Other beneficial effects include that coconut oil increases serum HDL cholesterol; it produces very little free radicals, as opposed to other oils; it is rapidly absorbed, rapidly metabolized and so does not get deposited and it helps in resisting invading micro-organisms.

http://www.ejmanager.com/mnstemps/20/20-1382676485.pdf
Coconut Oil and Health Controversy : A Review

It's still hard to tell whether the virgin coconut oil would be the real deal or just marketing tricks:

Coconut Oil – What Is It All About?

This article below counters some of the myths about coconut oil;

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/12/02/4140586.htm

Pretty nasty stuff?

http://agri.kps.ku.ac.th/ServKL/KLProduct-File/60-Safe%20use%20of%20sodium.pdf
Safe use of sodium metabisulfite in young coconuts

Reports of Young coconuts being treated prior to shipment

Sodium Metabisulfite: The preservative from hell

Coconut water is about 50% sugar and about 8% saturated fat. Turns out their nutrition claims are cuckoo also

https://www.facebook.com/JeffNovickRD/posts/243148812386487

Way back in 1974 Pritikin wrote a book called Live Longer Now. It is a great book which is probably no longer in print but if you can find a copy it is well worth reading. The man was a genius. Anyway. He cites experiments in which oils did indeed lower cholesterol in the blood but it was found that they also happened to deposit it in the tissues. If we could see our arteries every day in order to keep a check on what is happening then maybe one could take a chance on some kind of oil, although I am managing very well without. But we can't so I choose to avoid all oils completely.

Oils are good for frying and for roasting in the oven and I love the taste of olive oil, but the last thing I need is extra calories. Unless you are extremely active, which I am not, I see no need to go down the slippery slope of gradual weight gain. So no matter how safe an oil or fat is as far as artery damage is concerned (and I doubt it anyway) the fact is that all oils and fats are empty calories as is refined sugar and could lead to adding unwanted pounds.

didi

Live Longer Now is available on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Longer-Now-F ... longer+now

Let me start by saying I'm extremely grateful for the Campbells' work; the China Study got me started down the WFPB path 5 years ago. So I'm a HUGE fan.

Now let me say that the particular article the OP draws our attention to is very poorly written. If one of my students wrote it, I"d hand it back and say "You are making the reader work WAY too hard to figure out what you are trying to say. You need to state your position clearly and right up front, then use the balance of the piece to back it up." I've read it 4-5 times now, and every time I read it I think "What? I know he's not trying to say ___________, but it sure sounds like it." Eventually you get to a later section that makes you think "oh good, that's why I thought, so he wasn't trying to say that after all." But about 3/4 of the way though I'm left with the question: what the hell is he driving at here?

I don't think Campbell is saying sat fat is healthy, nor that it is benign. I think he's saying that the entire debate of carbs vs. fats is absurdly ill-defined. "Low fat" studies aren't really low in fat. And using sat fat as the whipping boy does no one any great service if the real issue is that people should be eating healthy foods (WFPBNO). The "low fat" bandwagon gave us Snackwells, remember?

I think the prose is just poorly constructed, and as a result, unintentionally misleading. The Bazzano research that has drawn so much attention and air play comes out of a research tradition rife with mischaracterizations ("low fat" = 30% fat?), and feeds into this weird obsession with culprits like sat fat, when people should be eating a WFPBNO diet that is naturally low in fat. His son, he says, is eating a diet that has, in the example he cites, 8% of calories from fat.

iowamv wrote:I don't think Campbell is saying sat fat is healthy, nor that it is benign.

His language in the previous article (linked to as a reference in this most recent one) is rather uncompromising:

TC Campbell wrote:Very simply, I am not aware of any serious evidence on function, which suggests that dietary saturated fat or cholesterol are causes of heart disease or cancer. Associations of these dietary factors with these diseases are nothing more than reflections of the consumption of animal-based foods and, by inference, inverse associations with whole plant-based foods (i.e., remember that animal-based foods tend to displace plant-based foods).

Emphasis mine. In other words Campbell is saying that plant saturated fat is just dandy, and plant cholesterol would be too, provided that plants produced it. No component of the associations between saturated fat and CVD could be explained by saturated fat as such. The evidence linking dietary cholesterol with raised serum LDL cholesterol is evidently not "serious," either.

I think what he has concluded is that since our bodies store excess calories as saturated fat and feeds that fat back to us it wouldn't make sense that nature would have designed the body to kill itself with heart disease. And since we are animals we are "eating" animal saturated fat on a continuous basis every hour of every day. He feels it's the animal protein that's the real problem. And since you can't separate animal protein for saturated fat just stay away from both.

Yep, that seems more clear. I wonder if his dietary advice is really much different from Dr. McD's though. If his son is eating a WFPBNO diet and achieving the low percentage of fat that he mentions, how much plant-based fat is he really getting? I'd bet it'd be hard to use any plant-based concentrated oils and end up with the 8% he mentions. That's the way I'm approaching McDougalling. Dietary sources of fat are o.k. (i.e., I don't worry about the fat in my rolled oats, made with water and cinnamon), but things like seeds, nuts, coconut, etc. are things to keep an eye on, especially when weight loss is a goal. Dr. McD gives them a yellow light in his Picture Book, not a red light.

I still think the take away of the OP's article is supposed to be that the reductionist search for super foods or particular culprits is wrong-headed, and that we ought to be following a WFPBNO diet. Concentrated oils of any kind, animal or vegetable based, would seem to not really have a place in that approach. Yes?

Jumpstart wrote:I think what he has concluded is that since our bodies store excess calories as saturated fat and feeds that fat back to us it wouldn't make sense that nature would have designed the body to kill itself with heart disease. And since we are animals we are "eating" animal saturated fat on a continuous basis every hour of every day. He feels it's the animal protein that's the real problem. And since you can't separate animal protein for saturated fat just stay away from both.

Uh, yeah, and cholesterol serves important functions in the body, and the body catabolizes its own proteins on a regular basis, so it 'eats' animal-derived protein too. The thin reasoning that you are attributing to him sounds an awful lot like it could be coming from a paleo bro-scientist.

You're right. There is nothing wrong with animal protein, saturated fat or cholesterol. It becomes deadly based on the amount of this stuff we eat. If that wasn't the case we'd have a lot of dead Okinawans from heart disease. Campbell's rats would have died from cancer eating both 5% and 20% casein. And Pritikin wouldn't have reversed his heart disease eating 3.5 ounces a day of fish and chicken. It pretty much is the same with sugar and white flour. If you down this stuff in reasonable amounts no harm is done. Most people in the world just don't understand the words reasonable amounts and therefore are better staying away all together.