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THE OILING oF AMERICA OILING AMERICA THE Modern-day diets high in hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of traditional animal fats are implicated in causing a significant increase in heart disease and cancer. Part 1 of 2 n 1954, a young researcher from Russia, named David Kritchevsky, published a paper describing the effects of feeding cholesterol to rabbits.' Cholesterol added to vegetarian rabbit chow caused the formation of atheromas—plaques that block arter- ies and contribute to heart disease. Cholesterol is a heavyweight molecule—an alco- hol or a sterol—found only in animal foods such as meat, cheese, eggs and butter. In the same year, according to the American Oil Chemists Society, Kritchevsky pub- lished a paper describing the beneficial effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids for lowering cholesterol levels.? (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. Mono-unsaturated 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, e.g., butter, tallow 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 consis- tently indicate that heart disease caused no more than 10 per cent of all deaths—consider- ably less than infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. By 1950, coronary heart disease (CHD) was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30 per cent 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 non-existent in 1910 and caused no more than 3,000 deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US. What lifestyle 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 bet- ter 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 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) 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 ‘hydro- genation’, was increasing dramatically. By 1950, butter consumption had dropped from 18 pounds per person per year to just over 10 pounds. Margarine filled in the gap, rising from about 2 pounds per person at the turn of the century to about 8 pounds. Consumption of vegetable shortening—used in crackers and baked goods—remained rela- tively steady at about 12 pounds per person per year, but vegetable oil consumption had more than tripled from just under 3 pounds per person per year to more than 10 pounds.* The statistics pointed to one obvious conclusion: Americans should eat the traditional foods—including meat, eggs, butter and cheese—that nourished their ancestors, and avoid the newfangled, vegetable-oil-based foods that were flooding the grocers’ shelves. 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 ear- lier in St Petersburg, in which rabbits fed saturated fats and cholesterol developed fatty by Mary G. Enig, PhD MGEnig@aol.com & Sally Fallon SAFallon@aol.com © 1998 NEXUS - 19 DECEMBER 1998 - JANUARY 1999