Saturated Fat is Good!

We’ve been told since the 1970′s that saturated fat causes heart disease and should be avoided at all costs. This should have set off alarm bells since saturated fats make up a good percentage of our brain and body, we’ve been eating them for the entirety of human history, and our bodies have multiple systems to manage them. As detailed in Gary Taubes’ books and other places, the evidence for saturated fats being harmful was flimsy at best and possibly fraudulent. Nonetheless, the entire country massively shifted its diet. People stopped eating butter and started eating margarine (yuck!). McDonald’s, whose beef tallow french fries were “almost sacrosanct” to founder Ray Kroc, switched to PUFA-rich soy/corn oil. Low-fat and non-fat products have become so ubiquitous that on a recent trip to Florida, I had trouble finding any full-fat products at all at a small grocery.The tragedy of this is that there is mounting evidence that this shift is one of the primary causes of the raging epidemic of obesity and chronic disease that has caused so much suffering.

The anti-saturated fat sentiment continues even though there is lots of evidence that it has nothing to do with heart disease at all. Here is a meta-analysis of 21 studies from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

http://www.ajcn.org/content/early/2010/01/13/ajcn.2009.27725.abstract

It analyzed the data from 347,747 subjects and concluded that “Intake of saturated fat was not associated with an increase of CHD (coronary heart disease), stroke, or CVD (cardiovascular disease).”

In fact, saturated fats together with mono-unsaturated fats (like olive oil or avocado) should make up the bulk of the calories in your diet. Many people have found tremendous health benefits and weight loss from increasing the saturated fats in the diet. What are the best sources? Here are some of my favorites:

Kerrygold butter. It’s from Ireland where the cows are grassfed. Trader Joe’s has it for $2.69.

Heavy whipping cream. Excellent whipped with berries, in coffee, or just straight. Starbucks will make latte’s with heavy cream (though they might look at you oddly).

Coconut oil. I especially like the Artisana raw organic extra virgin one, but they’re all pretty good. You can cook with it or eat it by the teaspoon. Will keep at room temperature for two years.

MCT oil. This stands for “Medium Chain Triglycerides” and it’s just the short chain saturated fats extracted from coconut oil. Unlike coconut oil, it’s liquid at room temperature, flavorless, and odorless. You can cook with it, put it in coffee or on salad, or take a swig of it. It gives you fantastic smooth energy and helps you lose weight.

Ancestral Health Symposium

I just got back from the Ancestral Health Symposium down in Los Angeles. It was awesome! All the top Paleo bloggers and authors were speaking. There were about 600 participants and it was completely sold out. The audience looked amazingly fit, healthy, happy, and energized. It was great to hear so many people whose blogs I read. One woman said it was like being physically in the internet! I bought some great Paleo cookbooks, got my copy of “The Perfect Health Diet” autographed, and sampled the fantastic Pemmican from US Wellness Meats.

Tons of great content in the talks. They were filming them so hopefully they will become available online. A fantastic talk by the Swedish doctor Andreas Eenfeldt about the dramatic improvements in Sweden adopting an LCHF (low carb, high fat) diet. There the medical establishment is supporting it and people have dramatically increased their consumption of butter, etc. and obesity and disease are dropping rapidly.

Robert Lustig added some great new ideas to his now famous viral “Sugar, The Bitter Truth” video. There’s lots of evidence that fructose increases fat and causes damage much more than glucose. But I’ve always wondered “Why?”. Fruits have been a part of our diet for a long time, why would a major constituent of them cause problems? His new theory which feels right to me is that in many of the environments we evolved in, fruit would only have been available a couple of months in the year and it would have been at “harvest time” when food was plentiful. We don’t hibernate like bears, so we need to stock up on energy when times are good to make it though the lean times. Fructose is a good signal to do that. So getting fatter with fructose is intentional! The problem is that now we get fructose all the time, so we just get fatter and fatter. His slides are here and the video of his talk is here.

I had a great dinner with Seth Roberts and Tucker Max. Tucker wrote the books “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” which is also a movie and “Assholes Finish First”. He’s super smart and really into Paleo. He’s been able to create a huge brand and make tons of money doing it. But he’s really interested in changing the power structure of media creation and distribution. We had a great discussion about new internet business models and radical change in the structure of commerce.

The event was just the begining. They have formed the Ancestral Health Society to promote evolutionary health ideas and are planning to make the conference be an annual event and to start a journal among other things:

http://ancestryfoundation.org/AHS.html

The Paleo/Primal/Perfect Health Diet

There is a revolution brewing in our understanding of nutrition that will dramatically improve human health. It is variously called the: “Paleo Diet”, “Primal Diet”, or “Perfect Health Diet”. It turns the USDA food pyramid (now the “Food Plate”) on its head. (One friend quipped that if you eat the food pyramid, you’ll look like the food pyramid!) In the new approach, saturated fat is good, while gluten, soy, fructose, and high omega-6 oils are bad. Eating this way has dramatically improved my health. I effortlessly lost 50 pounds in 3 months (20 pounds the first month, 20 pounds the second, and 10 the third) with no hunger and with improved energy and mental alertness.

My favorite reference about these revolutionary ideas is the book: “Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed Health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life” by Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet. He’s a physicist and she’s a biochemist. Their work is totally evidence-based and very practical. Every page of the book is about a third references. I’ve read it twice and am still learning lots from it. Their blog is excellent as well and goes into detail on many of the issues:

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/

Another excellent resource is Chris Kresser who is based in Berkeley and has a blog that expounds on similar ideas:

http://thehealthyskeptic.org/

He’s got an excellent summary series he calls “Steps to Perfect Health” which is well-worth studying:

http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-1-dont-eat-toxins
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-2-nourish-your-body
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-3-eat-real-food
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-4-supplement-wisely
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-5-heal-your-gut
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-6-manage-your-stress
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-7-move-like-your-ancestors
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-8-sleep-more-deeply
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/9-steps-to-perfect-health-9-practice-pleasure

I originally learned about many of these ideas from my friend Dave Asprey, whose “Bulletproof Executive” blog is great. Check out his one page illustrated guide to his version of the diet. And check out his “Bulletproof Coffee” which gives you incredible energy and mental acuity. I often also add MCT (Medium Chain Triglycerides) Oil and sometimes a raw egg for an energetic start to the day.

The Paleo blogosphere is blessed with an amazing number of well written, well reasoned blogs. Here are a few others you might enjoy:

Kurt Harris’s Archevore

Stephan Guyenet’s Whole Health Source

Petro Dobromylskyj’s Hyperlipid

Paleohacks’ Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Questions and Answers

Mark Sisson’s Daily Apple

William Davis’ Heart Scan Blog

Robb Wolf’s Revolutionary Solutions to Modern Life

Emily Deans’ Evolutionary Psychiatry

Art Ayers’ Cooling Inflammation