Cholesterol: The French Connection
Cholesterol In Your Diet To Avoid Heart Disease?
The French Have it Down
Dr. Glidden chooses July 14, Bastille Day signifying France’s Declaration of Independence, to discuss the French Paradox. This catchphrase was first used in the late 1980’s to describe the fact that the French have a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, and yet they consume a diet rich in saturated fats. Before the American Heart Association started telling us to stop eating animal fat and start using vegetable oils and Crisco, the incidence of coronary heart disease in the United States was relatively low. After Americans started using vegetable oils and Crisco heart disease went through the roof.
Enter the American Heart Association
In 1948 Proctor & Gamble, makers of Crisco, made the American Heart Association the beneficiary of the popular Walking Man Radio Contest, raising $1.7 million for the American Heart Association, transforming it from a small underfunded professional society into the powerhouse that it is today. And what did the American Heart Association have to do in return? They had to tell everyone in the United States to stop eating butter, stop drinking full fat milk, stop eating animal fats and start eating vegetable oils and Crisco. Thus was born the heart disease epidemic. During this time the French were still consuming fats, paying no attention to the U.S. diet hype, and their incidence of heart disease remained low. France is the 9th healthiest nation in the world, the United States is the 53rd.
Exit The Mediterranean Diet
Dr. Ancel Keys, 1904 – 2004, became famous in the 1940s for promoting the Mediterranean Diet, a diet low in fat which supposedly contributed to heart health. Dr. Glidden explains how Dr. Keys conducted this seriously flawed study and why his findings were fully accepted and won him a spot on the cover of Time Magazine. Everyone bought Dr. Keys’ “discoveries” and yet the Annals of American Medicine published a study in March of 2014 stating that saturated fat does not cause heart disease. Has your doctor shared that with you?