The Oiling Of America: How the Vegetable Oil Industry Demonized Nutritious Animal Fats and Destroyed the American Food Supply

The Oiling Of America: How the Vegetable Oil Industry Demonized Nutritious Animal Fats and Destroyed the American Food Supply

BIG BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND MEDICAL ORGANIZATIONS HAVE CAMPAIGNED DECEPTIVELY AGAINST CHOLESTEROL, MEAT, EGGS, BUTTER AND OTHER TRADITIONAL FOODS, LEADING TO HUGE PROFITS FROM SALES OF POTENTIALLY MORE HARMFUL MARGARINE, REFINED FOODS AND TRANS-FATTY ACID PRODUCTS. SCIENTIFIC DATA CONTRADICTING THAT PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY WAS SUPPRESSED AND CENSORED FROM PUBLICATION FOR MANY YEARS. DR. ENIG AND SALLY FALLON NOW TELL YOU THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW THAT HAPPENED.

Originally published in Nexus Magazine in two parts, Nov/Dec 1998 and Feb/Mar 1999. Republished here with permission of the authors.

The Oiling of America

by Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. and Sally Fallon

In 1954 a young researcher from Russia named David Kritchevsky published a paper describing the effects of feeding cholesterol to rabbits.1 Cholesterol added to vegetarian rabbit chow caused the formation of atheromas—plaques that block arteries and contribute to heart disease. Cholesterol is a heavy weight molecule—an alcohol or a sterol—found only in animal foods such as meat, fish, cheese, eggs and butter. In the same year, according to the American Oil Chemists Society, Kritchevsky published a paper describing the beneficial effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids for lowering cholesterol levels.2 Polyunsaturated fatty acids are the kind of fats found in large amounts in highly liquid vegetable oils made from corn, soybeans, safflower seeds and sunflower seeds. (Monounsaturated fatty acids are found in large amounts in olive oil, palm oil and lard; saturated fatty acids are found in large amounts in fats and oils that are solid at room temperature, such as butter, tallows and coconut oil.)

Scientists of the period were grappling with a new threat to public health—a steep rise in heart disease. While turn-of-the-century mortality statistics are unreliable, they consistently indicate that heart disease caused no more than ten percent of all deaths, considerably less than infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. By 1950, coronary heart disease, or CHD, was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30% of all deaths. The greatest increase came under the rubric of myocardial infarction (MI)—a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. MI was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than three thousand deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US. What life-style changes had caused this increase?

One change was a decrease in infectious disease, following the decline of the horse as a means of transport, the installation of more sanitary water supplies and the advent of better housing, all of which allowed more people to reach adulthood and the heart attack age. The other was a dietary change. Since the early part of the century, when the Department of Agriculture had begun to keep track of food "disappearance" data—the amount of various foods going into the food supply—a number of researchers had noticed a change in the kind of fats Americans were eating. Butter consumption was declining while the use of vegetable oils, especially oils that had been hardened to resemble butter by a process called hydrogenation, was increasing—dramatically increasing. By 1950 butter consumption had dropped from eighteen pounds per person per year to just over ten. Margarine filled in the gap, rising from about two pounds per person at the turn of the century to about eight. Consumption of vegetable shortening—used in crackers and baked goods—remained relatively steady at about twelve pounds per person per year but vegetable oil consumption had more than tripled—from just under three pounds per person per year to more than ten.3

The statistics pointed to one obvious conclusion—Americans should eat the traditional foods that nourished their ancestors, including meat, eggs, butter and cheese, and avoid the newfangled vegetable-oil-based foods that were flooding the grocers’ shelves; but the Kritchevsky articles attracted immediate attention because they lent support to another theory—one that militated against the consumption of meat and dairy products. This was the lipid hypothesis, namely that saturated fat and cholesterol from animal sources raise cholesterol levels in the blood, leading to deposition of cholesterol and fatty material as pathogenic plaques in the arteries. Kritchevsky’s rabbit trials were actually a repeat of studies carried out four decades earlier in St. Petersburg, in which rabbits fed saturated fats and cholesterol developed fatty deposits in their skin and other tissues—and in their arteries. By showing that feeding polyunsaturated oils from vegetable sources lowered serum cholesterol in humans, at least temporarily, Kritchevsky appeared to show that animals findings were relevant to the CHD problem, that the lipid hypothesis was a valid explanation for the new epidemic and that by reducing animal products in the diet Americans could avoid heart disease.

In the years that followed, a number of population studies demonstrated that the animal model—especially one derived from vegetarian animals—was not a valid approach for the problem of heart disease in human omnivores. A much publicized 1955 report on artery plaques in soldiers killed during the Korean War showed high levels of atherosclerosis, but another report—one that did not make it to the front pages—found that Japanese natives had almost as much pathogenic plaque—65% versus 75%—even though the Japanese diet at the time was lower in animal products and fat.4 A 1957 study of the largely vegetarian Bantu found that they had as much atheroma—occlusions or plaque buildup in the arteries—as other races from South Africa who ate more meat.5 A 1958 report noted that Jamaican Blacks showed a degree of atherosclerosis comparable to that found in the United States, although they suffered from lower rates of heart disease.6 A 1960 report noted that the severity of atherosclerotic lesions in Japan approached that of the United States.7 The 1968 International Atherosclerosis Project, in which over 22,000 corpses in 14 nations were cut open and examined for plaques in the arteries, showed the same degree of atheroma in all parts of the world—in populations that consumed large amounts of fatty animal products and those that were largely vegetarian, and in populations that suffered from a great deal of heart disease and in populations that had very little or none at all.8 All of these studies pointed to the fact that the thickening of the arterial walls is a natural, unavoidable process. The lipid hypothesis did not hold up to these population studies, nor did it explain the tendency to fatal clots that caused myocardial infarction.

In 1956, an American Heart Association fund-raiser aired on all three major networks. The MC interviewed, among others, Irving Page and Jeremiah Stamler of the AHA, and researcher Ancel Keys. Panelists presented the lipid hypothesis as the cause of the heart disease epidemic and launched the Prudent Diet, one in which corn oil, margarine, chicken and cold cereal replaced butter, lard, beef and eggs. The television campaign was not an unqualified success because one of the panelists, Dr. Dudley White, disputed his colleagues at the AHA. Dr. White noted that heart disease in the form of myocardial infarction was nonexistent in 1900 when egg consumption was three times what it was in 1956 and when corn oil was unavailable. When pressed to support the Prudent Diet, Dr. White replied: "See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI patent until 1928. Back in the MI free days before 1920, the fats were butter and lard and I think that we would all benefit from the kind of diet that we had at a time when no one had ever heard the word corn oil."