Adventists are not all vegetarian. Around 50% eat clean meats and the rest are a mix of pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan. Notably, many avoid processed foods.
The data sets showing higher mortality in those with lower cholesterol are building in number. Researchers get things wrong frequently and sometimes catastrophically, even with mountains of studies 'supporting' the incorrect theories.
We should always keep in mind that consuming factory farmed red meat (fed pesticide-laden feed, doused in pesticides, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, etc) may result in very different health outcomes than consuming grass-fed and finished organically raised red meat. Same goes for farmed fish and factory poultry.
I read the article and thought - where's the discussion on 'pastured' beef, lamb, chix, eggs ALSO wild finfish, shellfish.... Feed depending, farmed fish can be 'plenty' nutritious.
I've read where farming 'row crops' started ~10,000 years ago.
Ancient/heritage grains that complimented human health vs today's lack of nutrition density. i.e. Takes 2 or 3 apples to get the same nutrition one apple provided ~100 years ago.
That should be the next nuance of the food pyramid, that will likely be defined. In the meantime, I'm consuming mostly grass fed beef, lamb whenever I can find it (Coastal NC) and wild caught fish/shellfish from the ocean at our doorstep.
And this is why the diet industry stays in business. This is a very complex subject. As a Nutritional Scientist- eating simple and clean is the way to go. Meaning choose the butter over the margarine. Better yet make your own butter from local organic ingredients. Stay away from all processed foods!
I’m gonna go with a variety of proteins are better for you, and you have to source them well. Whole milk is better on a glycemic index than low fat milk. I agree that in general Americans eat way too many carbs, way too many sweets, and way to many gmo foods and foods laden in chemical preservatives and pesticides. . And, we don’t eat enough fermented foods. I’d like to know what the Amish eat.
I've spent time with the Amish community and a lot of what they eat is processed food and their health is not any better than that of other Americans who eat trash. Their teeth are terrible, weight is just as pudgy as SAD consumers. Sad to say, buying bread dough from the local big supermarket then selling it as home-baked bread (as I personally observed in Iowa 30 years ago), or pretzels from 'pretzel mix' from the processed food distributor, misses the spirit of integrity. More positively, there are some Amishmen who are recognizing that they too have been scammed and who are now leaders in the regenerative agriculture movement - for example John Kempf.
Hi H.S....I am very interested in the Amish way of life. Do you think different communities might have different health profiles? I recently was hiking and I was passed by a group of Amish young people...they appeared wonderfully healthy to me.
Thanks KN, I love this Amishparadise spoof!. My observation is that the plain folk community still take integrity seriously, but have been snookered by the NPK & pesticide salesmen just like anyone else, and who honor the letter of the law but the spirit? Well, you can have indoor lighting via refigured battery powered power tools.... I've met many at Acres USA (regenerative farming) conferences, and there are healthy people as well as those still struggling to figure out what makes health. A few I know a bit better are putting a lot of energy into living WITH the laws of nature thus do have better health. A conversation with an Amishman selling some farm products at a conference quickly went to computers: as long as it's a tool we use, and not a matter of people becoming the tool of the device It seems OK. Worth pondering.
I’m with Dr Drew on this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have read that there have been no studies that ever showed that lowering cholesterol has had an effect on rates of heart disease.
And your brain needs cholesterol to function! How many cases of dementia may be caused by artificially lowering cholesterol with statins? We’ll never know unless studies are done. And we know that early studies claiming fats are the culprit were falsified. I’m sticking with steak and eggs.
You are correct. One of the many uses of cholesterol in the body is the transport of fatty acids through the body. There are varied responses to eating saturated fat. Some people see their cholesterol as measured by the common tests go up while others do not. I am one who experimented and found after several years eating absolutely no cholesterol that my test remained the same. When I began eating meat again it did not change. What did change was when I cut the carbs out of my diet. Triglycerides went down and HDL went up. As far as evidence for the cholesterol leads to heart disease theory goes, Framingham has shown clearly that as we age, those with the highest cholesterol levels live the longest and those with the lowest don't last as long. There really is no evidence that saturated fat alone contributes to heart disease.
The thing that I can't dismiss is that a low fat whole food plant based it the ONLY way to actually REVERSE heart disease. Drs. Caldwell, Esselstyne and Ornish. It's hard to follow strictly but when I did, my total cholesterol dropped almost 100 points in just one month. Are there negative effects especially for older folks? I don't know but it is a concern.
When cholesterol drops it's NOT a good sign, instead an indicator that the body is probably consuming serum cholesterol rapidly to make new cells - like cancer cells, or is otherwise in distress needing lots of cholesterol to make repairs. When I did my masters (Human Nutrition) 26 years ago it was emphasized that when a nursing home patient's cholesterol dropped below 156, the home sent out word that they'd have a bed available soon, meaning that low cholesterol person was close to dying.
Having professional roots in clinical nutrition, experimented with vegetarianism (Macrobiotics) and most other 'latest discoveries', I've found the dietary recommendations based on the work of Dr Weston A Price DDS most practical, plausible, meaningful, and valid. It's based on extensive on-site observations of 14 'primitive' societies across the globe where each community had vibrant health, few or no cavities, broad dental arches with other corresponding skeletal sturdiness, no diseases of civilization - those currently 'the norm' in our society. Dr Price did his research in the 1930's but the folks I know who follow his work all tend to be happy, healthy, without heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc. I'll give a look at the work of the docs you refer to if you want to send a link, but I'm wary of plans that are not consistent with seasonal & local, minimal on site processing (like fermentation, soaking, sprouting & fermenting of carbohydrates), independent of factory produced foodstuffs.
This is probably a good place to start; lots of footnotes. I though I should mention that I'm not a strict adherent to WFPB and have been adding in some salmon, fish - I believe basically what Dr. M is saying.
From the NIH article you mentioned: "It is increasingly a shameful national embarrassment for the United States to have constructed a billion-dollar cardiac healthcare industry surrounding an illness that does not even exist in more than half of the planet." Hm, so what's the US doing that other countries aren't? Then "Okinawa,[3] the Papua Highlands of New Guinea,[4] rural China,[5] Central Africa,[6] or with the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico,[7] you better plan on a different profession because these countries do not have cardiovascular disease. The common thread is that they all thrive on whole food, plant-based nutrition (WFPBN) with minimal intake of animal products." How do we know this? I'm curious to see the support for this statement. How do people in rural China find vegetables in the winter? I'm presuming they have four seasons in most of that huge landmass, not many fresh veggies in the winter. The Tarahumara ate corn - nixtamalized so the tryptophan for vitamin B3 was available (and without B3 people go crazy, seriously), and REFRIED beans. What did they refry their beans in? Proteins and minerals are absorbed and best used when accompanied by fat. Any idea what this apparently ancient society has been using for fat - and fat soluble vitamins -- over the centuries? Central Africans drank milk (raw) and sometimes blood (also raw). I think we all eat plant-based diets; it's just that most of us avail of animals to convert those plants into forms we humans can actually use. For example, cows eat grass (which humans can't digest), then the microbes in their (cows') guts convert that to milk & meat etc which can nourish humans. They also provide manure to keep the soil fertile so plants can keep growing. I think you (Earl) are doing the right thing by including fish. For starters fish provide fats and fat soluble vitamins which simply are not present in plants. Then there's B12...
Nutrition is complicated, as Dr. Drew stated. Dr. McCullough acknowledges a direct line between consumption of non-essential saturated fats and cholesterol production. What is interesting is that people who are physically fit can have high levels of cholesterol and no heart disease. The problem is when cholesterol starts sticking to arterial walls, and that can be controlled by diet and exercise. Eliminating or significantly reducing inflammatory oils—particularly highly processed seed oils (also called vegetable oils like soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, and grapeseed)—is a strategy some experts recommend to help prevent cholesterol from sticking to arterial walls and forming plaque (atherosclerosis). Both doctors also mentioned the importance of reducing the intake of carbohydrates and sugars to reduce triglycerides. The key issue isn't just high cholesterol levels themselves, but oxidation and inflammation that make LDL ("bad") cholesterol more likely to damage artery linings and build up as plaque.
The inflammatory marker is LDL for sure. But it gets even more complicated because there are two types of LDL: Large Buoyant LDL, and Small Dense LDL. The Small Dense LDL is inflammatory, but Large Buoyant LDL is not. So, a high LDL count means nothing unless the cholesterol test results break it down into Large Buoyant and Small Dense. It’s called an advanced lipid profile test, more specific than a regular old cholesterol test.
If I have to choose between heart, disease, and dementia, I'll take heart disease all day long! My full fat parents, who loved butter and were raised on raw milk, lived into their 100's. Mom, 108. My dad, 101. They both had sharp minds and a strong bodies up until the end.
Yes dementia really detracts from your experience. In the "good old days"...of our parents generation there were not as many poisons in the environment. My parents also ate a lot of fat etc and lived to an advanced age and smoked a pack a day. My mother loved candy and I think it gave her alzheimers which unfortunately blighted her last years. Every day she would get mad at the caregiver and demand to know who she was and why she was sitting around watching my mom's television set. It was sad for us ....but kinda funny....
I eat a lot of pastured butter in coffee and cooking plus Grass Fed meat. I should have heart disease, right? What I don’t eat are grains which are seeds of grasses.
I'm a fan of eating butter, by the stick!! - haven't yet found that passage in the Bible where God says to Adam, looking at the Garden of Eden, "Behold, all this is for you, enjoy it -- oops, except for the fat. The fat - that has to be what's made in factories after long elaborate processes. That natural stuff, nah. I the Creator deliberately made that tempting but bad for you." Traditional 'primitive' societies all ate at least 30% natural animal fats, mostly saturated, with only 4-7% of the polyunsaturated fats. The primitive societies that ate more carbs were all heavier, because physiology is set up to convert excess carbs into FAT. Even ruminants live from fat, because microbes in the gut convert grasses, twigs etc into FAT, saturated fat. It's a body's primary fuel. off to get my morning beverage, mostly heavy cream with just a little bit of (herbal coffee-substitute). It keeps the head clear, provides enough cholesterol to generate all the crucial nutrients like steroid hormones and vitamin D and CoQ10, plus 25% of the lipids in the brain (itself 60% fat) which a body makes from cholesterol.
I cannot imagine life without butter.....My love note might read "You are the butter on my toast"...or "Butter my popcorn, baby!" or "Give me butter....or give me death".
A key component to Dr. McCullough's viewpoint is the idea that the liver should not be stimulated to produce cholesterol. The liver produces as much cholesterol as it does for reasons apparently still undiscovered by science. Personally, I believe, when in doubt, trust that God has designed the body to do what's best for it's long-term benefits. If one looks at the traditional Japanese diet, it is loaded with seafood - which Dr. McCullough has decided should be gone from the pyramid. Last I heard, on a nation by nation basis, the Japanese have the healthiest and longest lived of any nation on the planet when their people eat their traditional diet...
Shellfish are particularly high in cholesterol, and what keep people who are otherwise vegetarian healthy and functioning, likewise whole milk and eggs. Every cell in the body is capable of generating cholesterol, it's SO important for so many functions in the body. (Unless the Creator screwed up again, damn....) As Dr Kevin Stillwagon explains eloquently below, we need cholesterol, just not oxidized in our blood vessels -- a problem which comes from eating seed oils.
I like the simplification of saying eat real food. The seed oils are ultra processed. It has been proven the body has a limited ability to process PUFA's without clogging up the mitochondria. The government recommendations have little effect. I don't know anybody who follows the food pyramid. It's odd to think animal fat is bad. We are animals. We are animal meat and animal fat. I try to eat a balanced diet of real food.
Let's agree the new pyramid is better than the old one, which, if we were following that, has completely failed as reflected in the incidence of obesity. Historically (last 4000 years) the fat in the diet was about 50/50 saturated/unsaturated. Saturated fats may elevate the cholesterol somewhat, but so what. Is the cholesterol level in normal people even related to the length of life, which is one objective measurement we can use?
A man fasted for over a year and lost 276 pounds; His cholesterol level did not change. ("Prolonged Fasting")We make most of our cholesterol.
The ratio of omega 6 /omega 3 is based upon what the animal eats. All beef cattle are grass fed. The question is how are the finished in the lot, which accounts for much of the fat. Finish them with soybean (high in omega 6). you get higher omega 6 fat. ("Lipoproteins in Diet and Health")
As we know, the amount of insulin secretion is related to not only the amount of glucose, but also to the rapidly of absorption. A little more and a little more rapid for 30 years or so results in resistance. Wheat in the form of bread products has historically been the primary source of starch in the diet (Man can live on bread alone). But this was stone-ground wheat, which through the centuries has a consistent particle size. For the last 140 years millers have markedly decreased the particle size using steel rollers. This may be a significant contributor to the obesity/insulin resistance epidemic. ("bread in the Modern Diet") Kelly Gregg MD
I read the article and thought - where's the discussion on 'pastured' beef, lamb, chix, eggs ALSO wild finfish, shellfish.... Feed depending, farmed fish can be 'plenty' nutritious, imo.
I've read where farming 'row crops' started ~10,000 years ago.
Ancient/heritage grains that complimented human health vs today's lack of nutrition density. i.e. Takes 2 or 3 apples to get the same nutrition one apple provided ~100 years ago.
That should be the next nuance of the food pyramid, that will likely be defined. In the meantime, I'm consuming mostly grass fed beef, lamb whenever I can find it (Coastal NC) and wild caught fish/shellfish from the ocean at our doorstep.
There's another guide to what builds health besides double-blind crossover studies in science journals: study the health results of different cultures to see what produced healthy people.
That is what Weston A. Price did, and the resulting book showed that the various traditional cuisines, tho' different, typically led to a populace that had very low levels of tooth decay, a good predictor of overall health. Another clue was that children in those cultures grew up with wide dental arches and uncrowded teeth.
See for yourself in the hundreds of photos of children and adults on their ancestral diet vs on a commercially produced diet of processed foods:
Along with the scarcity of added sugar, those cultures did not have margarine, grain-finished beef, corn or seed oil (et al). Rather than our modern ubiquity of PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids), ancient communities got fatty acids mostly from animal fat (some locales had coconut and palm oil, which are saturated, and olive oil, which is a monosaturated lipid).
Dr. McCullough will recognize that very few studies focus on the benefit of saturated fat because there's no way to patent good food.
As a rule of thumb, don't ask a doctor about nutrition. Ask an anthropologist.
Right out at the bat, the headline of this article is biased. High heat heating of fat makes it carcinogenic, whether it saturated fat or seed oil. I live in a retirement home and they grill hamburgers on a flat grill coated with seed oil. I won’t eat those burgers because they smell bad and they are almost blackened on the outside without looking overcooked on the inside. And if you pick up one of these burgers in our cafe where you can watch the cook preparing the food, the room begins to take on the odor of burning oil. Breathing that in can’t be healthy either. And, unless you’re eating a large pound cake every day, most people are not eating a stick of butter. I thought the butyric acid in butter was supposed to be good for you.
Butyric acid, which is made by the microbes living in a healthy gut, from carbs and other food healthy people eat, is a major nutrient for the cells lining our intestines. Butter is named for it. Yay for real butter! I hope you do have some opportunity to get a decent burger occasionally.
I am very happy that this debate is taking place. This level of thought and exploration is so very welcome. Much better to hear this discourse than the old mantra that carbs are good and how a little bit of soda isn’t gonna hurt you. ( Here have some fruit loops…)
Personally I am curretly leaning to the Dr. Drew side on this debate, but the caveat for me on the Drew side would be that the butter should be grass fed. The dairy should be minimally processed, cheese naturally fermented, and the beef and pork should be pasture, raised and finished. Lamb, a good choice, not a popular red meat is naturally grass fed.
So glad that these two men stood against disgraceful pandemic policies and I appreciate and admire them both.
I think everything in moderation is safe and fine. I do eat mostly organic and limit my white carbs and sugars which has benefitted my health tremendously. Do people really eat sticks of butter? Yikes!
FOOD QUALITY (toxin-free, nutrient-dense, fresh) and TOXIN LOAD (in the animal and the human) might help sort out the saturated fat controversy??
If research was/is done with conventionally grown red meat, the saturated fat would have had higher levels of toxins since toxins stick in fat tissue ... and potentially impact how the liver makes cholesterol??
And even when people with high toxin loads (most Americans today) eat "clean", pastured meat, the clogging of arteries could still be a problem??
Food quality needs to be part of the guidelines at some point. And detoxification needs to be part of medicine and lifestyle generally....until we humans make a cleaner world. Meanwhile our children and patients in the healing process need the nutrients that only good, clean fats can deliver.
Adventists are not all vegetarian. Around 50% eat clean meats and the rest are a mix of pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan. Notably, many avoid processed foods.
The data sets showing higher mortality in those with lower cholesterol are building in number. Researchers get things wrong frequently and sometimes catastrophically, even with mountains of studies 'supporting' the incorrect theories.
We should always keep in mind that consuming factory farmed red meat (fed pesticide-laden feed, doused in pesticides, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, etc) may result in very different health outcomes than consuming grass-fed and finished organically raised red meat. Same goes for farmed fish and factory poultry.
Glad you recognized grass fed...
I read the article and thought - where's the discussion on 'pastured' beef, lamb, chix, eggs ALSO wild finfish, shellfish.... Feed depending, farmed fish can be 'plenty' nutritious.
I've read where farming 'row crops' started ~10,000 years ago.
Ancient/heritage grains that complimented human health vs today's lack of nutrition density. i.e. Takes 2 or 3 apples to get the same nutrition one apple provided ~100 years ago.
That should be the next nuance of the food pyramid, that will likely be defined. In the meantime, I'm consuming mostly grass fed beef, lamb whenever I can find it (Coastal NC) and wild caught fish/shellfish from the ocean at our doorstep.
And this is why the diet industry stays in business. This is a very complex subject. As a Nutritional Scientist- eating simple and clean is the way to go. Meaning choose the butter over the margarine. Better yet make your own butter from local organic ingredients. Stay away from all processed foods!
Exactly.
Very true are you.
I’m gonna go with a variety of proteins are better for you, and you have to source them well. Whole milk is better on a glycemic index than low fat milk. I agree that in general Americans eat way too many carbs, way too many sweets, and way to many gmo foods and foods laden in chemical preservatives and pesticides. . And, we don’t eat enough fermented foods. I’d like to know what the Amish eat.
And, raw whole milk is far more nutritious than pasteurized milk.
tastes better but costs a lot more....
Yes, it’s true that real food costs more than highly processed crap.
I've spent time with the Amish community and a lot of what they eat is processed food and their health is not any better than that of other Americans who eat trash. Their teeth are terrible, weight is just as pudgy as SAD consumers. Sad to say, buying bread dough from the local big supermarket then selling it as home-baked bread (as I personally observed in Iowa 30 years ago), or pretzels from 'pretzel mix' from the processed food distributor, misses the spirit of integrity. More positively, there are some Amishmen who are recognizing that they too have been scammed and who are now leaders in the regenerative agriculture movement - for example John Kempf.
Hi H.S....I am very interested in the Amish way of life. Do you think different communities might have different health profiles? I recently was hiking and I was passed by a group of Amish young people...they appeared wonderfully healthy to me.
ha ha ...I always got a laugh out of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg But it is not very nice.....
Thanks KN, I love this Amishparadise spoof!. My observation is that the plain folk community still take integrity seriously, but have been snookered by the NPK & pesticide salesmen just like anyone else, and who honor the letter of the law but the spirit? Well, you can have indoor lighting via refigured battery powered power tools.... I've met many at Acres USA (regenerative farming) conferences, and there are healthy people as well as those still struggling to figure out what makes health. A few I know a bit better are putting a lot of energy into living WITH the laws of nature thus do have better health. A conversation with an Amishman selling some farm products at a conference quickly went to computers: as long as it's a tool we use, and not a matter of people becoming the tool of the device It seems OK. Worth pondering.
DO I CREEP YOU OUT....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg
just watched Al's new one...couldn't stop laughing...sorry.
Anyway....I have heard that laughing and humor are very good for your heart and over all health...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwwPGvFXQXY
This is his new one!
I’m with Dr Drew on this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have read that there have been no studies that ever showed that lowering cholesterol has had an effect on rates of heart disease.
And your brain needs cholesterol to function! How many cases of dementia may be caused by artificially lowering cholesterol with statins? We’ll never know unless studies are done. And we know that early studies claiming fats are the culprit were falsified. I’m sticking with steak and eggs.
You are correct. One of the many uses of cholesterol in the body is the transport of fatty acids through the body. There are varied responses to eating saturated fat. Some people see their cholesterol as measured by the common tests go up while others do not. I am one who experimented and found after several years eating absolutely no cholesterol that my test remained the same. When I began eating meat again it did not change. What did change was when I cut the carbs out of my diet. Triglycerides went down and HDL went up. As far as evidence for the cholesterol leads to heart disease theory goes, Framingham has shown clearly that as we age, those with the highest cholesterol levels live the longest and those with the lowest don't last as long. There really is no evidence that saturated fat alone contributes to heart disease.
Thanks, Larry. You have a better command of the facts than I, plus personal experience, so I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
The thing that I can't dismiss is that a low fat whole food plant based it the ONLY way to actually REVERSE heart disease. Drs. Caldwell, Esselstyne and Ornish. It's hard to follow strictly but when I did, my total cholesterol dropped almost 100 points in just one month. Are there negative effects especially for older folks? I don't know but it is a concern.
When cholesterol drops it's NOT a good sign, instead an indicator that the body is probably consuming serum cholesterol rapidly to make new cells - like cancer cells, or is otherwise in distress needing lots of cholesterol to make repairs. When I did my masters (Human Nutrition) 26 years ago it was emphasized that when a nursing home patient's cholesterol dropped below 156, the home sent out word that they'd have a bed available soon, meaning that low cholesterol person was close to dying.
Nursing home patients may not be representative of the general population and are unlikely to be on low fat whole food plant based diets.
What do you think about Drs. Caldwell, Esselstyne and Ornish and documented heart disease reversal over the long term?
Having professional roots in clinical nutrition, experimented with vegetarianism (Macrobiotics) and most other 'latest discoveries', I've found the dietary recommendations based on the work of Dr Weston A Price DDS most practical, plausible, meaningful, and valid. It's based on extensive on-site observations of 14 'primitive' societies across the globe where each community had vibrant health, few or no cavities, broad dental arches with other corresponding skeletal sturdiness, no diseases of civilization - those currently 'the norm' in our society. Dr Price did his research in the 1930's but the folks I know who follow his work all tend to be happy, healthy, without heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc. I'll give a look at the work of the docs you refer to if you want to send a link, but I'm wary of plans that are not consistent with seasonal & local, minimal on site processing (like fermentation, soaking, sprouting & fermenting of carbohydrates), independent of factory produced foodstuffs.
This is probably a good place to start; lots of footnotes. I though I should mention that I'm not a strict adherent to WFPB and have been adding in some salmon, fish - I believe basically what Dr. M is saying.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5466936/
From the NIH article you mentioned: "It is increasingly a shameful national embarrassment for the United States to have constructed a billion-dollar cardiac healthcare industry surrounding an illness that does not even exist in more than half of the planet." Hm, so what's the US doing that other countries aren't? Then "Okinawa,[3] the Papua Highlands of New Guinea,[4] rural China,[5] Central Africa,[6] or with the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico,[7] you better plan on a different profession because these countries do not have cardiovascular disease. The common thread is that they all thrive on whole food, plant-based nutrition (WFPBN) with minimal intake of animal products." How do we know this? I'm curious to see the support for this statement. How do people in rural China find vegetables in the winter? I'm presuming they have four seasons in most of that huge landmass, not many fresh veggies in the winter. The Tarahumara ate corn - nixtamalized so the tryptophan for vitamin B3 was available (and without B3 people go crazy, seriously), and REFRIED beans. What did they refry their beans in? Proteins and minerals are absorbed and best used when accompanied by fat. Any idea what this apparently ancient society has been using for fat - and fat soluble vitamins -- over the centuries? Central Africans drank milk (raw) and sometimes blood (also raw). I think we all eat plant-based diets; it's just that most of us avail of animals to convert those plants into forms we humans can actually use. For example, cows eat grass (which humans can't digest), then the microbes in their (cows') guts convert that to milk & meat etc which can nourish humans. They also provide manure to keep the soil fertile so plants can keep growing. I think you (Earl) are doing the right thing by including fish. For starters fish provide fats and fat soluble vitamins which simply are not present in plants. Then there's B12...
Nutrition is complicated, as Dr. Drew stated. Dr. McCullough acknowledges a direct line between consumption of non-essential saturated fats and cholesterol production. What is interesting is that people who are physically fit can have high levels of cholesterol and no heart disease. The problem is when cholesterol starts sticking to arterial walls, and that can be controlled by diet and exercise. Eliminating or significantly reducing inflammatory oils—particularly highly processed seed oils (also called vegetable oils like soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, and grapeseed)—is a strategy some experts recommend to help prevent cholesterol from sticking to arterial walls and forming plaque (atherosclerosis). Both doctors also mentioned the importance of reducing the intake of carbohydrates and sugars to reduce triglycerides. The key issue isn't just high cholesterol levels themselves, but oxidation and inflammation that make LDL ("bad") cholesterol more likely to damage artery linings and build up as plaque.
The inflammatory marker is LDL for sure. But it gets even more complicated because there are two types of LDL: Large Buoyant LDL, and Small Dense LDL. The Small Dense LDL is inflammatory, but Large Buoyant LDL is not. So, a high LDL count means nothing unless the cholesterol test results break it down into Large Buoyant and Small Dense. It’s called an advanced lipid profile test, more specific than a regular old cholesterol test.
If I have to choose between heart, disease, and dementia, I'll take heart disease all day long! My full fat parents, who loved butter and were raised on raw milk, lived into their 100's. Mom, 108. My dad, 101. They both had sharp minds and a strong bodies up until the end.
Yes dementia really detracts from your experience. In the "good old days"...of our parents generation there were not as many poisons in the environment. My parents also ate a lot of fat etc and lived to an advanced age and smoked a pack a day. My mother loved candy and I think it gave her alzheimers which unfortunately blighted her last years. Every day she would get mad at the caregiver and demand to know who she was and why she was sitting around watching my mom's television set. It was sad for us ....but kinda funny....
I eat a lot of pastured butter in coffee and cooking plus Grass Fed meat. I should have heart disease, right? What I don’t eat are grains which are seeds of grasses.
I'm a fan of eating butter, by the stick!! - haven't yet found that passage in the Bible where God says to Adam, looking at the Garden of Eden, "Behold, all this is for you, enjoy it -- oops, except for the fat. The fat - that has to be what's made in factories after long elaborate processes. That natural stuff, nah. I the Creator deliberately made that tempting but bad for you." Traditional 'primitive' societies all ate at least 30% natural animal fats, mostly saturated, with only 4-7% of the polyunsaturated fats. The primitive societies that ate more carbs were all heavier, because physiology is set up to convert excess carbs into FAT. Even ruminants live from fat, because microbes in the gut convert grasses, twigs etc into FAT, saturated fat. It's a body's primary fuel. off to get my morning beverage, mostly heavy cream with just a little bit of (herbal coffee-substitute). It keeps the head clear, provides enough cholesterol to generate all the crucial nutrients like steroid hormones and vitamin D and CoQ10, plus 25% of the lipids in the brain (itself 60% fat) which a body makes from cholesterol.
I cannot imagine life without butter.....My love note might read "You are the butter on my toast"...or "Butter my popcorn, baby!" or "Give me butter....or give me death".
A key component to Dr. McCullough's viewpoint is the idea that the liver should not be stimulated to produce cholesterol. The liver produces as much cholesterol as it does for reasons apparently still undiscovered by science. Personally, I believe, when in doubt, trust that God has designed the body to do what's best for it's long-term benefits. If one looks at the traditional Japanese diet, it is loaded with seafood - which Dr. McCullough has decided should be gone from the pyramid. Last I heard, on a nation by nation basis, the Japanese have the healthiest and longest lived of any nation on the planet when their people eat their traditional diet...
I believe Dr. M wants seafood, but not red meat
Shellfish are particularly high in cholesterol, and what keep people who are otherwise vegetarian healthy and functioning, likewise whole milk and eggs. Every cell in the body is capable of generating cholesterol, it's SO important for so many functions in the body. (Unless the Creator screwed up again, damn....) As Dr Kevin Stillwagon explains eloquently below, we need cholesterol, just not oxidized in our blood vessels -- a problem which comes from eating seed oils.
I like the simplification of saying eat real food. The seed oils are ultra processed. It has been proven the body has a limited ability to process PUFA's without clogging up the mitochondria. The government recommendations have little effect. I don't know anybody who follows the food pyramid. It's odd to think animal fat is bad. We are animals. We are animal meat and animal fat. I try to eat a balanced diet of real food.
Let's agree the new pyramid is better than the old one, which, if we were following that, has completely failed as reflected in the incidence of obesity. Historically (last 4000 years) the fat in the diet was about 50/50 saturated/unsaturated. Saturated fats may elevate the cholesterol somewhat, but so what. Is the cholesterol level in normal people even related to the length of life, which is one objective measurement we can use?
A man fasted for over a year and lost 276 pounds; His cholesterol level did not change. ("Prolonged Fasting")We make most of our cholesterol.
The ratio of omega 6 /omega 3 is based upon what the animal eats. All beef cattle are grass fed. The question is how are the finished in the lot, which accounts for much of the fat. Finish them with soybean (high in omega 6). you get higher omega 6 fat. ("Lipoproteins in Diet and Health")
As we know, the amount of insulin secretion is related to not only the amount of glucose, but also to the rapidly of absorption. A little more and a little more rapid for 30 years or so results in resistance. Wheat in the form of bread products has historically been the primary source of starch in the diet (Man can live on bread alone). But this was stone-ground wheat, which through the centuries has a consistent particle size. For the last 140 years millers have markedly decreased the particle size using steel rollers. This may be a significant contributor to the obesity/insulin resistance epidemic. ("bread in the Modern Diet") Kelly Gregg MD
I read the article and thought - where's the discussion on 'pastured' beef, lamb, chix, eggs ALSO wild finfish, shellfish.... Feed depending, farmed fish can be 'plenty' nutritious, imo.
I've read where farming 'row crops' started ~10,000 years ago.
Ancient/heritage grains that complimented human health vs today's lack of nutrition density. i.e. Takes 2 or 3 apples to get the same nutrition one apple provided ~100 years ago.
That should be the next nuance of the food pyramid, that will likely be defined. In the meantime, I'm consuming mostly grass fed beef, lamb whenever I can find it (Coastal NC) and wild caught fish/shellfish from the ocean at our doorstep.
There's another guide to what builds health besides double-blind crossover studies in science journals: study the health results of different cultures to see what produced healthy people.
That is what Weston A. Price did, and the resulting book showed that the various traditional cuisines, tho' different, typically led to a populace that had very low levels of tooth decay, a good predictor of overall health. Another clue was that children in those cultures grew up with wide dental arches and uncrowded teeth.
See for yourself in the hundreds of photos of children and adults on their ancestral diet vs on a commercially produced diet of processed foods:
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html
Dr. Price later added one more chapter to the book, about MK-4, the little-known vitamin that prevents dental caries, and can even fill in cavities:
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/chapter-22-of-nutrition-and-physical-degeneration-on-the-fat-soluble-vitamins/
Along with the scarcity of added sugar, those cultures did not have margarine, grain-finished beef, corn or seed oil (et al). Rather than our modern ubiquity of PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids), ancient communities got fatty acids mostly from animal fat (some locales had coconut and palm oil, which are saturated, and olive oil, which is a monosaturated lipid).
Dr. McCullough will recognize that very few studies focus on the benefit of saturated fat because there's no way to patent good food.
As a rule of thumb, don't ask a doctor about nutrition. Ask an anthropologist.
Right out at the bat, the headline of this article is biased. High heat heating of fat makes it carcinogenic, whether it saturated fat or seed oil. I live in a retirement home and they grill hamburgers on a flat grill coated with seed oil. I won’t eat those burgers because they smell bad and they are almost blackened on the outside without looking overcooked on the inside. And if you pick up one of these burgers in our cafe where you can watch the cook preparing the food, the room begins to take on the odor of burning oil. Breathing that in can’t be healthy either. And, unless you’re eating a large pound cake every day, most people are not eating a stick of butter. I thought the butyric acid in butter was supposed to be good for you.
Butyric acid, which is made by the microbes living in a healthy gut, from carbs and other food healthy people eat, is a major nutrient for the cells lining our intestines. Butter is named for it. Yay for real butter! I hope you do have some opportunity to get a decent burger occasionally.
I am very happy that this debate is taking place. This level of thought and exploration is so very welcome. Much better to hear this discourse than the old mantra that carbs are good and how a little bit of soda isn’t gonna hurt you. ( Here have some fruit loops…)
Personally I am curretly leaning to the Dr. Drew side on this debate, but the caveat for me on the Drew side would be that the butter should be grass fed. The dairy should be minimally processed, cheese naturally fermented, and the beef and pork should be pasture, raised and finished. Lamb, a good choice, not a popular red meat is naturally grass fed.
So glad that these two men stood against disgraceful pandemic policies and I appreciate and admire them both.
I think everything in moderation is safe and fine. I do eat mostly organic and limit my white carbs and sugars which has benefitted my health tremendously. Do people really eat sticks of butter? Yikes!
FOOD QUALITY (toxin-free, nutrient-dense, fresh) and TOXIN LOAD (in the animal and the human) might help sort out the saturated fat controversy??
If research was/is done with conventionally grown red meat, the saturated fat would have had higher levels of toxins since toxins stick in fat tissue ... and potentially impact how the liver makes cholesterol??
And even when people with high toxin loads (most Americans today) eat "clean", pastured meat, the clogging of arteries could still be a problem??
Food quality needs to be part of the guidelines at some point. And detoxification needs to be part of medicine and lifestyle generally....until we humans make a cleaner world. Meanwhile our children and patients in the healing process need the nutrients that only good, clean fats can deliver.