Smashing the Big FAT Lie for Resilient Prepper Health

I bet Christopher Columbus felt like a proselytizing Jehovah Witness knocking on random doors to raise money for his ‘foolish’ voyage.

“You plan to do what!?” [sneering chuckles ensue]

“Why yes. I believe the earth is round and my ships won’t fall off that flat Earth map of yours.”

Folks holding on to myths and lies seldom desire the truth. The usual response is polite silence and eye-rolling when you turn your back. Occasionally, some myth-clinging soul launches an assault to defend the un-defendable – until a paradigm shift takes place. And even then, there remains bitter myth clingers. The flat Earth was thought to be domed by a bowl-shaped firmament – until science and Chris proved otherwise.

Many generations took the flat Earth model to their graves since Greek astronomers first proposed the spherical Earth paradigm in 6th century BC. Which brings us to today’s topic of people (preppers too) bitterly clinging to nutritional myths.

With an abundance of myths floating in the shallow end of humanity’s pool, it’s easy to see how we as preparedness minded folk embrace what ‘experts’ tell us are the best way to survive anything from short-term disasters to a mutant zombie biker apocalypse. I’ve read a wide variety of advise concerning ‘healthy’ diets for survival. I rarely agree. I’m not stirring the pot of conventional dietary wisdom just to create controversy (I lie – yes I am), I’m just knocking on as many doors as possible to share a new prepping paradigm that not only increases short-term survival, but will help you thrive long-term.

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“Sometimes you need to take a sledgehammer and crush what’s written in stone!” – John Paul Catanzaro

First up on the myth busting block: Eating saturated fat will make you obese and give you heart disease.

How did fabulous fat get falsely accused? Before I was born, Dr. Ancel Keys used questionable science to perpetrate what many consider to be the greatest nutritional/scientific myth ever. I remember following the low-fat craziness back in the 80’s. I tried living the lie for over two decades. I was in the middle of the herd, following the “expert” advice as late as 2002 from the Food & Nutrition Board: “Saturated fats and dietary cholesterol have no known beneficial role in preventing chronic disease and are not required at any level in the diet.”

Through flawed logic and selective science, Dr. Keys sold the Lipid Hypothesis – which American’s gobbled up (including me). Primal Docs hammers on this artery-clogging myth:

The lipid hypothesis was developed by Ancel Keys in the 1950s. This theory states that there is a direct relationship between the amount of saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet and the incidence of coronary heart disease. With questionable evidence, Keys went about writing articles and promoting this hypothesis throughout the medical world. Meanwhile, hundreds of subsequent studies testing this hypothesis have found differing conclusions. Despite the lack of evidence this notion took off throughout the healthcare world and was fueled by the vegetable oil and food processing industries that sought to benefit from this key finding.

Enter Big Pharma, FDA, and the Industrial Food Machine. Do the powers that be really sit around and come up with schemes to destroy our health and lives? Is this just another loony conspiracy theory? If so, the ‘conspiracy’ has wrecked individual’s health for the last 50 years. I recall eating bone marrow at my lunch table one day with my fellow teachers. Eyes were aghast and faces cringed as I carefully extracted the core with one of those small crab-eating utensils.

“Won’t all that fat you eat clog your arteries?” one teacher managed to utter – in between forks of chocolate cake.

In a relatively short time span, the lipid hypothesis began to be ingrained in our collective psyche. This twisted advice became more than one doctor’s two-cents’ worth. With the help of the FDA, Big Pharma, and our corporate Industrial Food Machine, the scheme to demonize saturated fat worked. Idiots in the media sold out without real investigation into their claims.

Try this on your next doctors visit. Tell him/her that you’ve adopted a lifestyle of eating 50% of your calories from saturated fats – even if you don’t – yet :). Go ahead and arrange for someone to pick you up from the nearest emergency room after your ride in the ambulance.

In the spirit of Shovelglove, grab your sledgehammer and join me as we smash the “Saturated Fat Stone Tablet”. Don’t have a sledgehammer handy? Just click with your mouse.

• The Saturated Fat Myth – Primal Docs
• The Forbidden Food You Should Never Stop Eating – “Conventional medical authorities say that consumption of saturated animal fats is bad for you and causes heart disease. But a hundred years ago, fewer than one in one hundred Americans were obese, and coronary heart disease was unknown.”
• The University of Minnesota and heart disease: Missed a beat – Researchers don’t always get it right, and Ancel Keys is a case in point.
• There Is Only One Type of Cholesterol: All of it Beneficial
• The Definitive Guide to Saturated Fat
• More FAT Advice from Mark’s Daily Apple

After clearing the floor from all the pieces of broken stone, you can start building health and resilience into your preps and lifestyle. I guess storing fat has been the biggest challenge for me and Dirt Road Girl. It’s hard, but not impossible. You can check out our food storage plan here.

The absolute best way to get saturated fats into our diet is to have the source available, either local farmers/ranchers, or owning animals ourselves. I also make tallow from grass-fed beef fat for cooking and making pemmican.

Since we don’t live in a tropical oasis full of coconut trees, we stock up on five gallon buckets of coconut oil. In case you haven’t heard, this is amazing stuff and well worth adding to your larder! Check it our here and here.

Folks, this Big FAT lie has cost American’s millions of dollars and their health. The man-made ‘healthy’ trans-fat oils we were told to substitute for real fat should be avoided at all costs.

Now for a big FAT breakfast/brunch with DRG.

Follow me on Twitter for the latest on our journey to self-reliance, preparedness, and resilient living: @SurvivalSherpa

 

Related articles

• Saturated fat is not the culprit in heart disease (healthimpactnews.com)
• Low fat dieters have higher heart risk (douglassreport.com)
• 10 Lies Spread by Nutritionists (lewrockwell.com)
• Saturated Fat Unmasked (selfhealthwellness.com)
• Our ancestors thrived on high-fat diets (sott.net)