The Big Fat lie, funded by Big Sugar. A story of government corruption and lots of corn.

Get your hands off my cheese and free my butter.

Many of us have lived by the theory that eating fats can contribute to heart disease, obesity, diabetes and higher cholesterol. I for one, grew up with the concept that eating a Low Fat diet was the key to being healthy metabolically, staying fit and keeping your heart on track.

Many of you might not know this, or if you do you might have forgotten, but when I was in high-school, I competed in 2 Miss Teen America Pageants. Those who know me probably think this is one of the most off-brand things but when you dig into what the events are, at the time they aligned. Each event was centered around an aspect of life that was a solid focus of mine. Swimwear was an event consisting of physical fitness, Interviewing was a great practice in public speaking and Dance was a coordinating of being a team player and showcasing memorization and spirit.

Durning this time I had a coach who would train me on all of these events, he would also do some nutrition consulting and I will never forget when he told me to avoid fats. Every single small high-school girl followed these recommendations. He preached margarine over butter, no extra fats when cooking at home or going out and many other things that were a part of the “anti-fat” campaign. This shaped many of our belief systems around what it took to fit into beauty standards and in my opinion, was so detrimental to our developing bodies.

The low fat diet comes from a theory purposed by a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys in the 1960’s. I went on to set the American Heart Association’s guidelines that we all have lived by to this day. This is a story that all American’s should know and be educated on, as it lays the foundation for propaganda and large corporate funding to take a foothold on American’s health for generations to come. This story is about greed, deception, cherry-picked data, America’s largest cash crop and the Sugar industry.

1955 in the United States,

Let’s set the scene before we dig into all of this. The year is 1955, Eisenhower is president and he had just suffered the first of a series of heart attacks.

At this time, the U.S. is a country ran by men, led by men and consisted of many men at risk for cardiovascular diseases. Eisenhower’s heart attacks brought America’s attention to the heart disease epidemic. People were terrified and they wanted solutions…fast.

Enter Ancel Benjamin Keys. Keys hypothesized that by replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, you would reduce your chances of cardiovascular heart disease. He shared his hypothesis at the World Health Organization conference in 1955. Shortly after, in 1957, Keys tried to convince the American Heart Association to adopt his “heart healthy" cause and, they turned him down.

Connections:

Unamused by being turned down, Keys looks to his connections to find support in his good friend and Doctor to President Eisenhower, Dr. White. Keys then received the mother-load of government funding (around $2 million dollars), secures a spot on the board of the American Heart Association and spends his time dominating the dietary guidelines committee.

In 1958, with the support of Dr. White and the AHA, Keys uses his funding to conduct a study called the Seven Country Study. This study would go on to be one of the most famous ethnographic studies in our history of nutrition today.

At this time, there were two theories at place. Key’s theory around saturated fats causing disease and heart failure and an alternative theory by a man named Dr. Yudkin who believed that the uptick in sugar consumption and processed foods were to blame. Because of Keys funding, Yudkin is pushed out and Key’s theory is brought into the limelight.

Keys goal was to travel 7 countries and find cultures that could “fit” into his narrative. A great example of “fit” can be comprised of the research done on the Island of Cete, a place that Key’s took a liking to and revisited 3 times to further his study. Keys was impressed by the people of Crete and became obsessed with their eating habits. He documented that they had less disease and heart failure and contributed it to their decreased fat intake.

When I dug into this specific example further, I found that Keys had many variables that should’ve been accounted for that he left out. One variable in particular that stuck out was that he traveled there to study this group durning the Christian holiday of a 40 day fast called Lent. Durning Lent, no consumption of any animal products, i.e. meat, cheese, milk, butter etc occur. It seems very obvious to me that this should not have been the time to collect such data around a “low fat” diet.

Keys ignored the other 72% of the worlds population at the time and chose to focus on the 18% that he could manipulate into looking good enough to present.

With Dr. White’s approval, Keys placed Eisenhower on his experimental “heart-friendly” “low-fat” diet. For those of you who don’t know the way this story ends, Eisenhower ends up developing type 2 diabetes, suffers from a stroke and goes on to have more heart attacks then, inevitably dies from intractable heart failure. Keys connection to Eisenhower is has since been kept under wraps and this connection is never made public. Cause that probably wouldn’t bode well for them…

I wanted to find a deeper connection to understand what shifted in America’s diet that wreaked such havoc in this time period.

So, let’s talk about Crisco…

In the early 1900s, Procter and Gamble started to utilizing cotton seeds (a toxic waste product) to turn into cooking oil.

It originally started as being used as oil for candles and soap but eventually turned into what we know today as Crisco cooking oil. Crisco somewhat resembles lard and is (objectively) more versatile than butter and can be stored at room temp. At the time they even claimed that is was easier to digest and healthier overall.

“Crisco was skillfully marketed as a cheaper alternative to lard. In 1911, Proctor & Gamble launched a brilliant campaign to put Crisco into every American household. They produced a recipe book, all of which use Crisco, of course, and gave it away for free. This was unheard of, at the time.”

Throughout the 1900s, Crisco and other cottonseed oils consumption skyrocketed. The below graph demonstrates the years of different fat consumption and the rise in obesity.

Back to Keys,

In January of 1961 Keys is featured on the front page of the Times with the AHA backing Keys hypothesis. The American Heart Associate suddenly releases the recommendations that the American people should start reducing saturated fats and cholesterol intake from foods such as butter, egg yolks and full fat milk, and they recommend replacing them with low fat alternatives and seed oils.

This was a HUGE deal. Why? It was the front page of the Times! People all across the world look to that publication as a trusted source and Key’s and his “Theory” are on the cover. The theory becomes so well funded that the advocates of other theories and research are completely shut down and the public accepts Key’s hypothesis as the final truth.

For those asking, Keys did run another study. From 1968 to 1973, Ancel Keys and Ivan Frantz run a large, randomized, controlled trial where saturated fats were replaced by unsaturated oils in peoples diets. These results were never shared. Spoiler alert, all of the results came back and invalidated his theory.

By use of funding and the media Ancel’s truth remain fact.

What next? And why is everyone growing corn?

During the 60’s in the U.S., food corporations and manufactures saw corn as a cash crop. It was cheaper to grow than other ingredients and they could use it to make refined sugar syrups and add it to their products. Corn syrup added weight, made their products sweet and most importantly, drove their profit margins up.

In 1964, Yudkin made the observation that in wealthier countries, where folks were consuming higher amounts of sugar, populations were experiencing several diseases including, obesity, dental cavities, higher levels of diabetes, heart attacks and plaque in the arteries. He ran trials that supported all his theories and in 1971, Dr. John Yudkin publishes his book called Pure, White and Deadly. Yudkin’s research showed that there was increased mortality and disease in the years following sugar consumption and the addition of sugar to our commercialized and processed foods. Yudkin’s research started to gain in popularity and scientific backing but because of the funding and the governments interest in Big Sugar, Keys hypothesis prevailed and Yudkin was swept under the rug.

Fast forward to 2016,

We arrive at the highest rates of heart disease, obesity and other life threatening illnesses attributed to diet in American history. And researchers uncover data and studies that link the sugar industry to paying off scientists in the 60s to downplay the connection of refined sugars role in heart disease and, get this, PROMOTE saturated fat as the culprit instead #thatsalotofcorn.

The documents express that in 1964 John Hickson (a big time sugar industry executive), came up with a plan with other big time sugar industry dude-bros to shift the publics opinion about the heaps of evidence that shed light on the relationship between high sugar diets and the country’s high rates of heart disease.

For those of you asking, how do you “shift” public opinion? The answer is simple, you start with fear of an life threatening disease, you fund a bunch of “research” and you use the media to pump it into the mainstream circulation.

This specific “research” group, is formally known as The Sugar Research Foundation (now known as The Sugar Association). The Sugar Association paid three Harvard scientists around $60,000 each (in todays dollars) to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and instead exaggerate Ancel Keys’ hypothesized theory of saturated fats and heart disease. The studies used were hand-picked by the Sugar Group. Each scientist shared their findings and rough drafts with Mr. Hickson until he was satisfied with the findings supporting their agenda. The article was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. Yudkin’s findings were further shutdown and everyone started tuning “fat free”.

Around this time companies needed to figure out how to make fat free taste good. If you guessed sugar, you would be correct. Once you remove the fat out of food, you’ve removed the heart and soul of the product, it’s lack luster. Sugar made its way into the spotlight and took over every dairy product, every cookie, every jar of mayo or bottle of ketchup, etc. Fat free immediately turned into “full of sugar”.

The average American consumes 126.4g of sugar a day and we are still battling the epidemic of heart disease.

Well, I for one am very upset by this information and I am left to contemplate the idea of a bunch of people sitting around in a room knowing they are causing harm to a population but choosing to ignore it for the payoff. I am also upset at the bamboozlement that the media and cooperate funding corroborate on to paint the picture that we should all ditch our golden, silky, butter fat and swap it out for rancid seed oils that cause heart/ brain diseases and throw our endocrine systems off. And meanwhile, they get us all addicted to sugar and processed foods in the wake of it!?

From where I am sitting, this all seems to be a giant scheme of money and collusion to make and keep people sick. You get people addicted, paid off doctors and scientists to back it up, folks get sick, you develop a drug to fix it and now you’ve got them on the hook for life. Think about the endless possibilities of disease within an unwell body, literally anything can go wrong. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, ADHD, depression, anxiety, leaky gut, dental issues, immune system composition, cancer, the list goes on and on and on and these people have a pill for all of it.

This is set to cause GENERATIONS of disease through DNA damage. Did none of them consider the ramifications of these actions??? How many family/ friends do you have that suffer from these diseases? The answer for me is majority. Majority of the folks I know have battled or are battling with one or more of these issues. And it can all be traced back to this. It can all be traced back to “recommended guidelines” that our government agency funded organizations have put out to keep us “healthy” and “safe”.

For many of you, that last paragraph was probably a doozy. I just think that the further I go down these rabbit-holes, the more I see that these systems that have been set up “for us” are actually just set-up to make money. We should completely question them until we are educated enough to make our own informed decision.

Fighting back looks like education. It looks like spending your dollars where they go far with the right folks. I for one would way rather pay my farmer than my pharmacist.

To learn more about the healing properties of full fats and which ones to avoid see my post on The Alchemy of Fats here.

Until next time,

cp