Do you know how many people died of heart attacks in 1900, four years before Crisco was introduced?
NONE!
Everyone ate lard and butter, and their hearts were fine. So let's not listen to the massive marketing campaign, now in its second century, to persuade people not to eat the healthy fats eaten worldwide for millennia.
Crisco, made of the industrial waste product cottonseed oil (the name comes from "Crystallized Cottonseed Oil"), with hydrogen added to make it stable at room temperature, was billed as a lard substitute. Originally created by brothers-in-law Proctor and Gamble, who had made soaps and candles with lard and tallow, they saw their profit margin increase dramatically by turning cottonseed waste into substitute lard. But with Edison's invention of the electric light bulb, the need for candles diminished. What to do with all that cottonseed oil?
Well, if it can be used as lard in candles, why not use it as lard in cooking?
And because it is cheap, cheap, cheap to make, they had plenty of money to spin the marketing any way they wanted. Certainly cheaper than butter and lard, they could call it a "health food." Economical and healthy.
And, when people started dying of heart attacks fifteen years later, that was such a long time, it was hard to draw the connection. And when industry did draw the connection, they simply turned up the cry: "Butter is the cause!"
The farmers were out milking, and didn't have much money to fight the marketing juggernaut.
But we have the internet now, so this farmer is speaking out.
If you love your family, don't feed them Crisco. Even if the hydrogenation process wasn't extremely harmful, the cotton itself is one of the biggest genetically modified crops. Don't eat Roundup Ready cotton.
Eat butter. Eat lard. Live well.
[Summarized from a fascinating presentation by Kevin Brown of Liberation Wellness, presented at the Weston A. Price Foundation's annual conference in November 2010.]
Thursday, May 26, 2011
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Makes sense and fits in with the documentary "Fat Head" which--in essence--points out that even eating fast food three meals a day won't make you fat, as long as you use your brain and don't drink soda and limit your carbs. Fat is good for you!
ReplyDeleteInteresting stuff.
~Luke
Not sure where he got his information. Here's a summary for the US, of death rates by cause of death since 1900. Major cardiovascular disease death rates were the same in 1900 and 2000 (and higher in the 1950's): http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922292.html
ReplyDeleteAnd here is more information with a nice chart: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4830a1.htm
It appears possible that in 1900 "they" only collected generic data on heart disease... so the specific data on heart attacks might be missing. Of course "we don't know" and "zero" are not the same thing :)
Clearly, from all the information available, people's eating/health habits up to the 19040's and 1950's were causing an increase in heart diseases, and eating/health habits since then have contributed to a decrease in heart disease.
One of the major factors attributed in the second article is "consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol has decreased since 1909 (15). Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination surveys suggest that decreases in the percentage of calories from dietary fat and the levels of dietary cholesterol coincide with decreases in blood cholesterol levels (16)"
Perhaps a more humble takeaway from all this: looks like people have been dying from heart attacks and coronary heart disease all along... but hydrogenated oils may make it even worse.
By the way... got to be careful with associating any particular change in diet to an observation of other changes. It just might be a coincidence!
ReplyDeleteFor example, from the data, one could conclude that introducing Crisco to the American diet led to the elimination of Tuberculosis as a fatal disease :)