The height of absurdity regarding the topic of fats occurred when the American Medical Association (1995) released a pamphlet suggesting that humans can eat anything, including sugar, candy, soda, etc. as long as it was low in fat. “To control the amount and kind of fat, saturated fatty acids, and dietary cholesterol you eat, choose low-fat cookies, low-fat crackers, unsalted pretzels, hard candy, gum drops, sugar syrup, honey, jam, jelly, and more.” This statement only makes sense if dietary fats do indeed increase heart disease as we’ve been told for 5 decades. But there is overwhelming evidence today that refutes this position. This is simply another case of health authorities fooling themselves and us! We believe them because they are the “experts.” Back when this claim was first published, I put my faith in this particularly misguided advice, and I started to put on weight immediately!
In 1944, New York City Hospital cardiologist Blake Donaldson (see his book ‘Strong Medicine’, pub. 1960) prescribed a mostly meat diet to his obese and overweight patients. After one year without success prescribing low-calorie diets to his patients, he decided to go to the local museum of natural history and ask resident Anthropologists what our prehistoric ancestors ate. They told him “the fattiest meat they could find, with some minimal roots and berries for variety.” He took their expert advice and put his patients on ½ lb of meat, 3 times a day, with small portions of fruits and potatoes to try to mimic the Paleolithic diet. I know this seems to be a lot of protein, probably more than I could recommend today, but he prescribed this diet to his patients for 40 years (until his retirement) and treated 17,000 patients successfully. His record speaks for itself. This diet was adopted by Dr. Alfred Pemmington to treat DuPont executives in the late 1940’s and also led Dr. Herman Taller, a New York OB, to write the book ‘Calories Don’t Count’ in 1961, a very controversial diet book at the time.
Our genes were shaped over 2.9 million years ago when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, before the introduction of agriculture only 12,000 years ago. The Paleolithic Age (or Stone Age) comprises 99.5% of human history, where 100,000 generations of people lived as hunter-gatherers. The last 10 generations (or 200 years) are known as the industrial age–the age we live in today, and the preceding 600 generations lived as farmers. The last 10,000 years of human life have had little impact on our genetic makeup, while the previous 2.9 million years is what has shaped our genetic preferences.
Maybe we should get back to our roots and eat like our ancestors did!
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