The Houston Ship Channel is clogged with beef fat. Unlike petroleum, which has a colorful sheen on the water's surface, beef fat turns into a solid cake, looking like a waxy ice flow.
There's a lesson there. The take-home message is that animal fat is solid at room temperature, and that is a sign that it is loaded with saturated fat -- or "bad" fat, because it raises your cholesterol level and increases the risk of artery blockages.
When I was a child growing up in North Dakota, my mother cooked bacon for her five children. When it was done, she pulled the hot strips out of the pan and set them on a paper towel to drain. She then carefully picked up the frying pan and poured the hot grease into a jar, aiming to save it for later. But she did not store the jar of bacon grease in the refrigerator; she simply put it in the cupboard. She knew that as it cooled, it would turn into a waxy solid. The next day, she spooned some of the bacon grease into a pan and fried eggs in it. It's amazing that any of her children lived to adulthood, but that is the way we ate until we learned better.
Every year, the average American swallows 200 pounds of meat, 33 pounds of cheese, and nearly 60 pounds of added fats and oils. Within minutes of a fatty meal, the arteries become stiffer, the blood becomes more viscous and our bodies look -- on a small scale -- a bit like the Houston Ship Channel.
It was not always this way. Meat intake is 75 pounds higher now than a century ago when the Department of Agriculture first started keeping records. Cheese has increased by nearly 30 pounds, and added oils have increased, too. Here is why:
Increased disposable income. We have more money to spend on food than we did in the past. It's actually a smaller fraction of our overall expenditures than ever.
Dining out. Particularly with the advent of fast food and pizza restaurant chains, which emphasize meat, cheese and fried foods, there is grease galore on our plates. Nearly half of all our meals are eaten out of the home.
Government programs. Subsidies for the production of meat and cheese reduce the costs of serving up fast food and pizza, and commodity programs send these foods into schools and hospitals.
As a doctor, let me encourage us all to keep that image of floating fat firmly in our minds. If it causes us to limit the amount of meat in our diet, we'll be a lot better off.
John Robbins: How Bad Is McDonald's Food?
Dr. Joseph Mercola: What's in Fast Food? What's in the Non-Chicken Half of the McNugget
Suzan Colón: The Genius of the Heart Attack Grill
David Katz, M.D.: Nutritional Information: The Best Way to Judge the Health Value of Foods
Western pattern diet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The American Diet: A Sweet Way to Die
The American Diet: USDA Chart Compares What We Should Be Eating To ...
Those who speak up about moderation have a great point here. A side of bacon served up with love for breakfast is a fine way to start the day for most kids -- it's a daily compilation of bacon, pizza, hamburgers and steak that's killer.
Making meat the accompaniment, rather than the main, is one way to go. For anyone looking to moderate their lifestyle with real food (beats pills and surgery!) check out:
http://athomewithrealfood.blogspot.com/2011/01/eggplant-i-said.html
I agree with just about everyone else who asserted general portion control is more of a solution than just cutting out meat. Overeating is overeating, no matter what the food is.
Saturated fat is GOOD for you. It is a MUST in a healthy diet. Please, google WAPF and give it a fair read. By fair I mean fair.
Furthermore, the causality between blood serum lipids and heat disease is bidirectional if not completely backwards: cardiovascular inflammation is a *cause* of high blood serum lipids. Epidemiological studies show that lowering blood serum lipids with pharmaceutical statins is not substantially correlated with reducing the incidence of heart disease.
Even if dietary saturated fat were a "bad thing", pork fat and beef fat are lower in saturates than dairy fat or coconut fat or palm fat. The composition of animal fat is also strongly dependent on feed: grain feeds result in more saturated fat whereas pasture feeds result in more omega-3 essentially fatty acids.
The cultural shift from animal fats to seed oils has coincided with epidemic rises in obesity whenever and wherever such shifts have occurred in the world. Seed oils are exceptionally high in omega-6 fatty acids, which block uptake of the dwindling sources of omega-3 in diets based on commodity agriculture.
If you insist on reducing the woes of the Standard American Diet to a single image, it would have to be mountains of surplus #2 yellow dent corn stacked beside a full grain elevator in Iowa.
Nicely put sir.
But I would go further than "at least as likely" to 70-80 percent!
Pretty much sums up Texas.
Please read Gary Taubes. Please.
The cause (beyond people's own lazyness about nutrition) is the plethora of cheap, carbohydrates.
Various humans populations throughout history have thrived on widely divergent proportions of protein>fat>carbohydrate, yet the epidemic of early-onset diet-related diseases in the absence of outright malnutrition and food unavailability is a relatively recent phenomenon. So we need to look beyond merely blaming some one or other particular macronutrient.
My grandparents ate a diet chock-full of carbohydrates yet they were both in relatively good health until almost 90. But they understood both 1) reasonable portion sizes, and 2) the value of actual physical work.
There are two things I think that are more important than how we eat is exercise. I work out fairly hard 3-4 times a week. My hypothesis is that we're evolved to work hard like that and our bodies are much happier when we're doing that. The other thing I think is that if one is descended from a population where that sort of diet has been around for a millenia -- like a western European -- you're much more likely to be OK eating it. If one is from a population where the body isn't adapted to those foods one won't be OK with it.