Living a full (fat) life

Fact: Americans are gaining weight and many will experience health consequences in their lifetime that will be

complicated by their weight status.

Myth: Full fat foods are making

Americans gain weight.

Traditional diets have always included high quality sources of plant and animal fats. Check out the Weston Price Foundation for detailed descriptions of the importance of full fat foods in our diet from a modern and historical perspective.

The idea that dietary cholesterol and saturated fats lead to heart disease oversimplifies (and/or ignores) the issue of the changing quality of animal foods we consume and the American diet as a whole becoming more refined and nutritionally inadequate. Current research published this year finally raises some good discussion of the saturated fat & heart disease link among the medical community. A large meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Siri-Tarino et al. "showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD." (CHD = coronary heart disease, CVD = cardiovascular disease) The authors suggest in a later publication that the role of refined carbohydrates has a much larger role in CVD than currently given credit for.

As the giant nutrition dork I am, I spend my free time searching on PubMed for articles pertaining to the differences in nutrient profiles of grass-fed animals to grain-fed animals. Articles dating back to the early 70's document that the nutrient profiles of grass-fed animals is significantly different than that of grain-fed animals! Meat, milk, cheese, and butter from grass-fed animals is higher in omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and lower in cholesterol than products from grain-fed animals. This is because these animals have evolved over many hundreds of years to eat a diet of grass, not grain and industrial by-products. And we evolved to eat these grass-fed animals, not grain-fed animals. Really, health problems (for the animals and for those who eat the animals) on the rise? Is this so surprising?

These research studies were, and still are, being conducted not to advocate for healthier animals by letting them remain in the pastures, but rather to find a new way to manipulate the animals' diet in order to produce the fatty acid composition they desire without subtracting from their profit margin. This is how 40 years worth of research on the health disparities between grass-fed and grain-fed ruminants gets ignored; scientists feel that they can do better than nature. Even if the perfect concoction of industrial by-product feed was fed to cattle and produced the fatty acid composition that health experts believed was best for us, would it really be as healthy as an animal eating the food from the earth in a manner like its ancestors?

Our national culture has demanded cheap food, and that's just what we got. The price is cheap, and the quality is cheaper. And again, I am fascinated by the idea of xenohormesis; the idea that when we eat a stressed, obese animal, we ourselves become stressed and obese because ingesting the animal product sends stress signals in our body to produce stress hormones and prolonged release of stress hormones lead to weight gain.

So processed foods. The word "processed" is deceptive and not accurate. We have been processing our foods for thousands of years through procurement and preservation practices. What is new is that we are removing nutrients from our food and then adding back laboratory extracted and/or synthesized ingredients not naturally present in the food via our current mass-processing and shelf-stabilization techniques. We are the petri dish on this one, folks.

Let's look at the nutrition ingredient facts for a fat free cheese compared to a full fat cheese, just for fun:

Kraft Singles Fat Free Sharp Cheddar Cheese

Whey, Skim Milk, Whey Protein Concentrate, Water, Contains Less Than 2% Of Sodium Phosphate, Dried Corn Syrup, Milk, Salt, Sodium Hydroxide, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Sodium Citrate, Lactic Acid, Whey Protein Concentrate, Lactose, Maltodextrin, Sorbic Acid As A Preservative, Artificial Color, Yeast Extract, Carrageenan, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavor, Citric Acid, Cheese Culture, Natural Flavor, Xanthan Gum, Butteroil, Enzymes, Vitamin A Palmitate. Trivial Source Of Fat. Milk.

(Goodguide's rating: 4.9 for health, 5.3 for environment)

Tilamook Extra Sharp Cheddar, Vintage White

Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes.

(Goodguide's rating: 3.1 for health, 10 for environment)

So what is the difference between these two cheese choices?

1. Well, the fat free cheese has had every drop of fat removed followed by the addition of a bunch of crap that mostly are the byproducts of other industries to make the cheese taste and feel like cheese in your mouth whereas the regular cheese has the same three ingredients that cheese has had in it since humans started making cheese.

2. Notice that the Kraft singles has vitamin A added to it. Butter is naturally rich in vitamin A as well as contains small amounts of vitamins E, D, and K. Vitamin A, E, D, and K are all fat-soluble vitamins, meaning that they need to be in the presence of fat in order for our body to absorb and utilize them. Kraft singles give you the vitamin A, but without fat, this vitamin A will be coming out the other end in a day or two.

3. The Kraft singles are cheaper than Tilamook cheese. Here is the sad irony, it is cheaper to buy milk from unhealthy cows and add in a boat load of additives than it is to treat cows well and culture the milk in the traditional fashion.

4. Goodguide has decided that the Kraft cheese is "healthier" than the Tilamook cheese. This is based off of the "good fat" vs. "bad fat" misinformation of our times. (I apologize for the overuse of quotations, folks - but it feels so necessary!) All fat has important biological functions in our bodies, and while it is true that Americans and westernizing nations consume an excess of fat, it is because we are eating an excess of calories. So of course this results in excess fat in the diet, but it also results in excess of simple carbohydrates. Excess simple carbohydrates (think white bread and pastries) are primarily responsible for the deposition of central adiposity (fat around the organs), not dietary fat. (Central adiposity is much more dangerous to our health than subcutaneous fat evenly distributed about our bodies.)

Hm, so interesting, eh? I don't know about you, but I'll take the full fat cheese, myself - perhaps just a smaller portion.

So if you wish, pick up a glass of whole milk or a slice of whole milk cheese from local farms that raise healthy animals and congratulate yourself. You have just done something great for yourself and your community!

In the simple yet right-on words of Michael Pollan:

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."