THE AMERICAN DIET

I believe the answer lies in how the diet of the American population has

changed over the last 100 years. Our diet since the early 1900's has evolved

into an abundance of progressively more unhealthy, life-threatening

foodstuffs filled with harmful vegetable fats which is also devoid of many

vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids as well. Our grandparents and

great-grandparents who were raised in the late 1800's and early 1900's lived

a primary agricultural existance with 80% of Americans living on small family

farms or in rural areas. Before 1910, heart attacks were virtually unheard

of. By 1930, heart attacks accounted for no more than 3000 deaths/year. By

1960 that number had risen to over 500,000, Genetics cannot explain this huge

increase over one or two generations. Some lifestyle change caused this

increase. What was it???

The Department of Agriculture began to keep track of food "disappearance"

data around 1900 and noted a change in the consumption in the kind of fats

Americans were eating. Butter consumption was declining while the use of

vegetable oils, especially oils that had been hardened by a process called

"hydrogenation" to resemble butter was increasing -- dramatically. By 1950

butter comsumption had dropped from about 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. Simulataneously,

vegetable oil consumption tripled from just under three pounds per person per

year to more than ten!

The statistics point to one obvious conclusion that is completely contrary

to our current notions of what constitutes a "healthy diet". Americans

should eat the traditional foods that nourished our ancestors including beef,

butter, whole milk, eggs, and cheese. They should AVOID new-fangled

vegetable-based oils that more-and-more, flood our supermarket shelves.

This requires the complete rejection of the "Lipid Hypothesis" of

atherosclerosis that states that narrowing of the arteries is a consequence

of cholesterol being '"laid down" in the arterial wall. This theory

postulates that saturated fat from animals sources raises blood cholesterol

levels and leads to the deposition of this cholesterol and other fats as

plaques in the arteries.

However, population studies from around the world do NOT support this

theory and NO published study in the last 30 years has ever demonstrated

lowering serum cholesterol by eating a "low fat, low cholesterol diet"

prevents or reduces heart attack or death rate. For example, in 1968 the

International Atherosclerosis Project examined 22,000 corpses from 14 nations

and found arterial plaque was the SAME in all parts of the world - in

populations that consumed large amounts of fatty animal products and those

who were largely vegetarian, in those with high rates of heart disease and

populations with little or no heart disease. This points to the fact that

thickening of the arterial wall with age is perhaps an unavoidable process

yet does not necessarily develope into clinical heart disease. It

invalidates the Lipid Hypothesis of heart disease which also does not explain

the tendency for fatal clots that occur in the coronaries ("coronary

thrombosis") that cause myocardial infarction ( heart attack).