Make Mine Scrambled With Lots Of Butter!

Or The Scienciness of Cholesterol

Flashback 100 years, to Russia in 1908. M. A. Ignatovsky is totally screwing with nature in the name of medical research. His subjects: Fluffy Little Bunnies... with a taste for flesh!


Well, not exactly. Our buddy Ignatovsky decided to see what would happen if he fed animal protein to bunnies. The rabbits developed atherosclerosis, the hardening of arteries that is linked to heart disease. He concluded that if the bunnies got rock hard arteries from eating protein, then protein must be at fault. Five years later, a similar experiment was done to rival Igny's. A group of doctors decided that this time, our fluffy friends would gorge themselves on cholesterol. They found that the rabbits had fat and cholesterol deposits in their hardened arteries, thus cholesterol, not protein, must be to blame for their atherosclerosis.

The flaw in this experiment: Rabbits are herbivores!

In nature, rabbits would never consume any cholesterol because it comes exclusively from animal products and rabbits don't eat animal products. Their little vascular systems don't know what to do with all this added cholesterol because they are not meant to process it. They are essentially poisoned. The best part of this conclusion is that according to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov who wrote The Cholesterol Myth, "These deposits do not even remotely resemble those found in human atherosclerosis." Awesome. I totally buy it now, don't you? Rabbits eat a ton of cholesterol instead of alfalfa and get a cardiovascular problem in no way similar to human heart disease, thus cholesterol causes heart disease! Ya' see my infallible logic?

Okay, let's keep going and look at the human experiments on cholesterol. Feed a bunch of actual omnivores, who are meant to process cholesterol, foods high in cholesterol and see what happens. How 'bout eggs and milk? Sounds good. But to make sure that we get the results we want, let's dry them first and feed people powdered milk and eggs in which the cholesterol is known to become oxidized and be unhealthy. This was the logic behind the major studies that "proved" cholesterol causes atherosclerosis. Real food was not used, industrial "food" was. Who in their right minds would think that the damaged cholesterol in dried milk and eggs is the same as the whole cholesterol in real milk and eggs? Certainly not the author of The Heart Revolution, Dr. Kilmer McCully who says, "Pure cholesterol, containing no oxy-cholesterols, does not damage arteries in animals."

I could detail fifty more years of questionable science in which researchers pointedly eliminate populations that do not confirm, or in fact negate, their hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease. But it's not necessary. I'll just give you one fun anecdote about food scientists and their scienciness (scienciness is to medical experiments as thruthiness is to journalism). We are told, according to nutritional guidelines that we should eat no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Why is that? In 1968, there was some serious scienciness going on. A bunch of food scientists argued what the maximum amount of cholesterol one should consume daily was; many were against setting a limit at all. In the end, it came down to the fact that the average person eats about 580 mg per liter of blood. So... what do they do with this fact? "Eh, let's just half that." To make it even, they called it 300 mg. This has nothing to do with any actual tests or experiments related to how much cholesterol your body can absorb, it is simply an arbitrary number. It's not even halving the total cholesterol intake of the average American. Remember, 580 mg was the amount per liter of blood. The average person has 5 liters of blood in their body. That means that the average amount of cholesterol consumed in 1968 was 2,900 mg. They were essentially using scienciness to tell people to cut their cholesterol intake by 1/10th based on the early twentieth-century scienciness that we saw earlier. Eggs, the poor devils, were pretty much out since one already contained nearly a day's dose of cholesterol all on its own.

Cholesterol, itself, is not the bad guy. In fact, cholesterol is in your body to help repair it. Cholesterol is found in the gunk that helps heal injured arteries. Nina Planck, author of Real Food (the book that got me started on all of this in the first place) makes a really great analogy. If you see lots of firefighters at a fire, do you assume that they caused it? If you see lots of cholesterol in a damaged artery, do you assume that it causes damaged arteries?

Again, I could keep going for a long time, but the important thing is that real food is good for you. Industrial food is bad. Real milk and eggs do not cause atherosclerosis, powdered food products do. The first heart attack in the US wasn't until 1912 . I promise you, people were eatin' a lot of cholesterol before 1912, it was just natural and none of it was oxidized. Toss your powdered milk and gulp a big glass of raw whole milk. After all, it does the body good.

Real Food: Liverwurst

I've been reading this book about "Real Food" and how industrialized foods lead to poor health. The argument is simple: Americans who eat industrialized "health" food are found to be far less healthy than those who eat traditional foods--thus industrialized foods (soybean oil, white flour, all things "refined") are likely to blame and not traditional "unhealthy" foods (like butter, beef, and saturated fat in general).

My plan to becoming a healthier person actually involves eating way more meat. In Korea, I was going through a kilo of chicken by myself a week. This meant roughly three cuts of chicken breast a day. Also, for the first time in ages, I was consuming a lot of milk--not skim milk because they didn't have it, but real milk, often fortified with DHA. I felt good. I wasn't exhausted all of the time, I slept well, and I steadily lost weight despite consuming more fat than I used to. Most importantly, I was not eating a lot of refined sugar, flour, or oils. So I know that this works for me.

Today we are going grocery shopping and I plan on loading up on animal products and when they become available, a ton of local products too. Local means not only lower carbon-footprint but also higher immunity to local allergens and diseases. Om nom nom local. Today, we're going to buy our meat at the meat market instead of the supermarket. Local eggs from the co-op. If I could find local, grass-fed, raw milk, I'd be on top of that too.

What I look forward to most about today's shopping: liverwurst.



As kids, we ate a lot of liverwurst. At the time, it was just some sort of sandwich spread and I thought nothing of it. Due to my family's pretty epic New England meets Long Island accents there were a lot of words that had no meaning to me because I didn't actually understand them. I knew that grapes grew on the gray-barber not the grape arbor. We put libahwuhst on our sandwiches, didn't everybody? As I grew older, I read the label and discovered that we were eating some sort of liver paste. Unacceptable. When my dad joked with his friends that the first solid food he fed us was liverwurst I was mortified. I considered it one of the many ways in which my dad chose to torture us throughout childhood.

As it turns out, liver is traditionally a child's first solid food because it is rich in iron which is lacking in breast milk. Granted, liverwurst is not exactly organic calf's liver, but it's liver nonetheless. Cassady says in response to this news, "Our father, the accidental parent." Nutritiondata.com (one of my favorite websites) has this to say about liverwurst's health properties:

The good: This food is a good source of Protein, Riboflavin and Iron, and a very good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin B12 and Selenium.

The bad: This food is high in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol.

A lot of what I have been reading praises the virtues of eating saturated fats--after all, these are the fats that we have been surviving off of for millenia not industrialized trans and polyunsaturated (processed omega-6, in particular) fats. So, is it just me or does the good completely outweigh the bad?


Additionally, on the glycemic load scale (0-250) liverwurst gets a 1. A 1! You want to stay generally under 100 a day and some foods are up near 250... liverwurst is a 1. It is considered a "complete protein" because it has a balance of amino acids. Om nom nom liverwurst! I am also a fan of its high levels of B-12 because some time in the near future I want to have strong, healthy babies. Most importantly, this is not a food that was brought to my attention as a "health food" or a miracle of real food, just an average food that I decided to look up the value of. It is simply a real food that I grew up on. Strip off the layers of Little Debbie, Fritos, and diet soda--what are some of the real foods that you grew up on that are surprisingly beneficial?

(Next up: wheat germ or coconut)