High fat diets cause heart disease everyone knows that, right? Well, actually, no, now we are learning that fat is essential to good health. Fish oil is good for the heart, trans fats are bad. How do we know which fats are which? Should we all just become vegetarians and forget about it? Raw nuts, flax seed, virgin olive oil, avocados, coconut oil, these are all healthy fats. But what about beef, chicken, dairy and pork, saturated vs unsaturated fats, and Omega 3’s, 6’s, and 9’s???

What’s all the fuss about anyway, humans have eaten high fat (animal) foods for centuries, why is it now that we think this is causing heart problems? The answer to this is that in the last 70 years the way we feed and raise livestock has changed, and the incidence of heart attacks started to rise around the same time. Coincidence?…before the 1930’s, heart attacks were unheard of, and feeding anything but grass to a cow was laughable. But that all changed with the industrial revolution, fertilizer made it possible to produce huge amounts of crops and with the surplus of corn and grain we found the perfect solution, feed it to the cows! Well that was all well and good except for one little problem, cows didn’t evolve eating corn and grain and started getting sick when fed such a diet. They also didn’t produce the same quality meat. You can see where this is going, right into your arteries… That’s right, inferior fats in the animal food supply were shown to cause heart disease, only no one realized it wasn’t the cow’s fault!

It took some time to figure it all out, but saturated fats were blamed for the problem and unsaturated fat became the rage. Vegetable oils, margarine, lean meats, low fat milk, etc. But the rate of heart attacks didn’t change, in fact it became worse…So then came the cholesterol lowering diets and drugs, well, mostly drugs…. Still no great change, which brings us to the present day when trans fat was discovered, a non-functional saturated fat that is the result of food processing. Interesting, studies analyzing the content of clots in post-heart attack victims show a predominance of trans and unsaturated fats, not saturated…

So what are we to do? Go back to the way it was before all this mess started, eat grass-fed livestock, good saturated fats, oils with omega 3’s and other fatty acids found in fresh, non-pasteurized butter, milk and cheese. (6’s and 9’s are also important but plentiful in the rest of our diet) Do you think it matters that most dairy products come from corn and grain feds cows, you bet it does! Grass-fed is best… What about pasteurization, doesn’t that protect us from getting sick, well yes, but that was back when cows got TB, raw is actually much higher in nutrients, including lots of good fats, enzymes and probiotics but then that’s a whole other story!

In years of old we also ate a lot more organ meats, like liver. In order to process fat into all the good things we need in our body, to prevent things like heart disease, cancer and the common cold, we need Vitamins A and D, which are plentiful in organ meats, but not in much else. So take some Cod Liver Oil to be sure you have enough of these important vitamin nutrients!

In conclusion, good fats are good for the body, bad fats are bad….check the meats you are buying for what they have been fed and look at the food buying guide from www.westonaprice.org, you are what you eat, eat well!