by Mary Enig, Ph. D
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Book report by Liz Pavek (c) 2001
Of all the books I have read on REAL NUTRITION, three really stand out: "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration," by Weston A. Price, DDS, "Know Your Fats," by Mary G. Enig, PhD., and "The Cholesterol Myths" by Uffe Ravnskov. If you have these three books in your nutrition library, and you can find Weston A. Price Foundation on the internet, you will be well-armed in the fight for the American diet. (I have to now add a fourth: From PMS to Menopause: Female Hormones in Context by Ray Peat, Ph. D.)
In "Know Your Fats," I was even able to keep up through the "scientific parts," where Dr. Enig describes each type of nutritional fat and explains its molecular structure and how each fat is turned into a toxic artificial fat by hydrogenation and high-temperature processing and refining. I used up one whole fat yellow marker on this book. (I would have saved a lot of ink if I had just marked the stuff I didn't want to keep!)
I had no idea before I read the book how vital natural saturated fats are in human nutrition. I knew something about it, but I never realized how very important they are. I have really had my eyes opened.
I have friends who are struggling to stay healthy (stay alive?) on the travesty passed off as the Standard American Diet. They are taking anti-cholesterol medications, eating vegetable oils and margarines instead of natural fats, loading everything they eat with sugar, usually followed by frosted cake for dessert, and wondering why they are so sick all the time. Trying to explain to people who think their doctors are gods that their gods are poisoning them is not a good pastime for anybody with a brain. Or a heart. It is killing me to watch my loved ones kill themselves on the synthetic diet demanded by most doctors, and it is good to be able to find facts like this to help me help them.
The idea that we have cheated a generation and a half of our posterity out of essential nutrients by removing natural fats from the diets of our children and grandchildren simply makes my blood boil. It makes me furious that medical doctors, who should know better, have swallowed the lie so completely. It adds to that fury when I realize that thousands of people with treatable diseases have died as a direct result of the faulty "nutrition science" of the "Lipid Hypothesis" pushed onto them by doctors who owe it to their patients to do their homework before prescribing anything.
What makes me the maddest, though, is the knowledge that there are pharmaceutical companies and food manufacturers, like ADM, Monsanto, Proctor and Gamble, DuPont, and Nestlé out there who have known all along that the oils they were denaturing and turning into "Frankenstein's monsters" were toxic unto death for humans in all countries and and all strata of life. They have known all along that the sugar-bloated garbage they pass off as "food" is as toxic as rat poison. The food/pharmaceutical/chemical giants continue to market these poisons because they can make so much money off them:
The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market - that is to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence.
---Matthias Rath, M.D. in Death By Doctoring
They are even marketing them to our animals. No dog on a proper diet gets diabetes. No cat eating the right foods has convulsions. Yet we continually force our pets to eat corn and soybean meal and oil, middlings, and sugar in several forms. And all pet foods are loaded with trans fats, just like human food is, which are at least as deadly to pets as they are to the owners of those pets.
Today, believe it or not, Americans eat a diet that consists of little besides artificial fats and meats from animals force fed soybeans, corn, hormones and antibiotics. They consume refined and denatured starches, petroleum-based colors, artificial flavors, flavor enhancers, excitotoxins, dough conditioners, synthetic vitamin supplements, genetically-modified fruits and vegetables, and sugars that are so toxic that they can singlehandedly induce diabetes in susceptible patients. All this is done without even a glance at the ingredient panel of the package they open. The miracle is that anybody actually survives on a diet like this. If this isn't proof positive of the adaptability and will to live of the human body, I don't know what is.
The Standard American Diet is not going to produce optimal growth in children, optimal health in adults, or even minimal health in anyone who consumes it. How can people obtain the nutrients they need from a diet that kills test animals on a regular basis?
Think I'm exaggerating? Get that package of Hamburger Helper out of the cupboard, and see if you don't at least find the following (this is from memory, so please bear with me. I'm probably leaving out two-thirds of the ingredients): Hydrogenated vegetable oil (cottonseed (not a food crop, so it is heavily sprayed with toxic pesticides), soy, or corn), high fructose corn syrup, MSG (maybe as "hydrolyzed vegetable protein"--more soy), salt, dextrose, (corn sugar) maltose, (more sugar), textured vegetable protein (more soy), enriched high-gluten durum wheat flour (stripped, bleached, enriched--with synthetic vitamins), egg solids (cremated protein and fats) [some kind of pasta here, with its own lengthy list of additives, supplements, and preservatives], dehydrated vegetable flakes, dehydrated tomatoes, "natural" and artificial flavors and coloring, potato starch, etc., ad nauseam. Sounds appetizing as heck. I won't even go into what goes into cold cereals (But I did. See What's For Breakfast?)
The best fats, as far as I was able to tell from Dr. Enig's book, are coconut oil and cholesterol, with butter and egg yolk being right up there. All saturated fats, according to Dr. Enig, are essential for body health, and some are so essential that they cannot be duplicated by synthesized oils or non-tropical plant oils.
And Dr. Enig says this about the idea that saturated fatty acids are dangerous: "The idea that saturated fatty acids, which are the kind your body makes out of excess carbohydrate and protein, are a problem is a piece of misinformation that is very unfortunate because it has taken away the healthy fats and given the consumer a large portion of very unhealthy fats."
If you read this book, you will gain a lot of extremely useful information. If you read it carefully, and memorize some of it, you will be arming yourself against a lot of the misinformation that is in the public news. But, best of all, you will learn how to get yourself healthy, how to stay that way, and how to have healthy kids who have healthy kids.
Mother Nature will NOT tolerate being synthesized.
Find this book at amazon.com