Rob Hanna
Rob Hanna
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

Hmmmm… hey Ian, please check out the clinical work, tweeting and research of Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Ted Naiman and Dr. Benjamin Birkman to bring you a little more bench-depth for your next article.

In fairness, your article views are not your fault — the preponderance of documented opinion and literature out there merely reinforces and sustains itself with so many vested financial and professional interests riding on keeping that status quo unchanged. Unless you’re deep into the practice or spend time with practitioners in the field it’s impossible to parse mainstream rhetoric into cogent truth.

Fortunately there is a growing movement, including practicing medical professionals and researchers. Many practitioners are striving to correct this erroneous cultural belief system and damaged health policy towards saturated fats with something more factual. Why? Because saturated fats are capable of reversing the decades long negative health trends driving 2/3rds of our population into metabolic diseases and chronic sub-optimal health…

Here’s a slight reshuffling of your above grocery list, this would be better in terms of sharing information about healthy outcomes for people in practice:

#1 saturated fats from whole animals and whole fish with Omega 3:6 ratios of 1:1 or better

#2 raw unpasteurized, grass-fed cow butter

#3 cold pressed olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil

Throw away every other fat product in your kitchen.

Best wishes.

Here’s the TL:DR

Information about dietary fats, saturated fats in particular, is skewed to the negative because of a lot of incoherent dogma from self-promoting commercial interests, regulatory captured health policies and academic careers more focused on cheery-picking data for grant subsidies and getting their publication counts up for professional advancement than putting practical facts into the public domain.

And that’s ok, their purpose is not to drive positive outcomes in practice, it’s to create novel publications and lots of them…

However, such collaterals can be horribly damaging when misused to gain profits and create commercial moats that also end up destroying our population’s access to true health providing commodities and well-being.

CONTEXT: Science is about achieving intentional, replicable effects of expected results that better reflect reality. These discoveries of better results often disrupt the status quo — by their very nature they raise a middle finger and disprove all previous assertions now revealed to have been erroneous. Assertions like all saturated fats are bad, etc.

The problems against good science progressing naturally by well-intentioned individuals have always been the powerful incumbents — those with something to lose when the status quo changes. Poor Copernicus.

In these circumstances it is the truth teller and all those who would benefit from the truth who suffer most. In the case of saturated fats being vilified, and others being raised to prescriptive qualities, it is our entire population as well everybody else abroad that eats a meal who are suffering, as public health metrics regarding obesity, type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome fully reveal.

Science progresses by accepting any single piece of evidence that refutes/disproves the prevailing theory. Science has no regard for petty conceits of the status quo or vested commercial interests —at least this is the essence of good science in practice and what should get written about and publicized.

Today, the majority of peer reviewed academic literature gets dressed up as science and used as a commercial cudgel — even when such works are non-reproducible.

Additionally, industry has co-opted academia to produce many of these works, through grant subsidies and employment, merely to produce a caseload of evidence helping to prop up and support their financial incumbency, for whatever commodities and products they’re selling.

We don’t care much when such topics are about turning sand into silicone chips, but we should care and fight tirelessly against such lies when it concerns everyone’s health.

As it does with saturated fat consumption.

The prevailing legacy theories regarding saturated fats are negative metabolic effects and all mortality consequences. These results are non-reproducible in practice.

Actual clinical results in the field go further, as they entirely disprove these legacy theories with null hypothesis proof — many people have been prescribed to eat diets rich in saturated fats and have reversed metabolic syndromes, Type II diabetes, etc. as well as simply demonstrated healthier metabolic profiles and lifestyles than others and their previous selves when they didn’t eat saturated fats (as per conventional theory).

Dietary saturated fats as harmful was stillborn as a scientific fact and practical behavior. It only lives in academic abstractions and journalistic puff pieces. It is apocryphal.

We should look upon such dogma in the same light as we now do regarding Big Tobacco getting medical professionals to tout smoking as healthy in the previous century — it sure looked and sounded good at the time, but there was never any evidence, merely good marketing.

We only need one incident of contrary evidence to destroy an entire theory, i.e. saturated fat is bad. And we have many — documented incidents of patients eating saturated fats and gaining beneficial short and long-term effects, reversing disease and leading to better lifestyles and overall wellness.

How does incumbent commercial and career interests account for this, they get more strident and claim saturated fats are now POISON!!! Lol.

It’s true that saturated fats don’t have a cute soundbite theory as to why they are healthy. Perhaps becuase we don’t have a big enough public relations pimp firm like Ketchum, industrial backing from Monsanto/Bayer, Big Ag or any significant mainstream journalism (other than a few bestselling authors in a fringe market) vested in supporting these facts, yet.

And why should they now? There’s no money in it and only the risky proposition of damaging one’s career and status for no upside… better to wait, right?

Similarly the inverse is true for PUFAs and seed oils, which many industrialists enjoy as high profit margin commodities and happily spent billions repackaging, branding and selling such crap as essential nutrition.

Seed oils are not food staples and never should have become such.

Their nutritional costs are severely high in health impacts as regards Omega 6 prostaglandins and chronic inflammatory effects driving autoimmune disorders. But industry campaigns supporting them now are simply too big to fail... so go suck on some linseed oil (er flax) that I use to thin my oil paints and feel good about it while there’s still some social proof left.

Here’s to being fat and happy, but the practical way!

    Rob Hanna

    Written by

    Rob Hanna

    I’m an Innovation Adoption Architect—meaning I help others improve social and environmental baselines with impacts at scale. Let’s all improve the world!