Sugar or Saturated Fats - Which is the Real Enemy?

146 Reasons Why Sugar is Ruining Your Health

From The Vegetarian Myth, page 207:

The pieces of the disease puzzle started coming together as early as 1885, when a German researcher found that “sixty-two of seventy cancer patients were glucose-intolerant.”

By the mid-1960s, scientists were observing that insulin stimulated malignancies to grow.

In 1967, Howard Temin, a Nobel prize-winning cancer researcher, found that without the presence of insulin, cancerous cells didn’t grow. Other doctors noted the concurrence of diabetes and breast cancer. This was in

  1. And yet we’ve been told repeatedly to eat that high-carb diet, with its requisite insulin overload. “Low-fat, plant-based” is the endless round of rosaries that our public health institutions have to offer. In fact, prayer probably would be more effective — it could hardly be worse.

Another researcher, Robert Stout of Queen’s University, Belfast, showed how insulin both increases the transfer of fats and cholesterol into the arterial walls and promotes the synthesis of fat and cholesterol within the arterial lining. In 1969, he co-authored a paper with diabetologist John Vallance-Owen, blaming ‘large quantities of refined carbohydrates’ for all of it.

He would go on to show in 1975 that insulin triggers the growth of the smooth muscle cells of the arteries, the beginning of high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis. Scientific studies had noted the concurrence of diabetes and Coronary Heart Disease as early as 1929.

Page 170:

There is a huge array of epidemiological studies that show no correlation between saturated fat consumption, cholesterol levels, and heart disease. Let’s look at some of those first, not because I think they’re so great as a concept, but because proponents of the Lipid Hypothesis love epidemiological studies so much. First are all the paradoxes: the French Paradox, the Greek Paradox, the East African paradox, the Swiss Paradox, the Pacific Island Paradox. These countries have high levels of saturated fat consumption, but low levels of heart disease. France has one of the highest—the French consume four and a half times as much butter as US Americans, for instance—but the French have substantially lower CHD.

The Masai of Kenya eat a diet almost entirely of meat, milk, and blood. On average, young Masai warriors ingest 300 grams of animal fat every day. Yet their cholesterol levels are some of the lowest found anywhere—averaging under 160—and heart disease is unknown.

On autopsy, atheromas (bad arterial plaques) were absent. George Mann, the researcher who studied the Masai, was led by his findings to declare the Lipid Hypothesis “the public health diversion of this century … the greatest scam in the history of medicine.”

A study of the Samburu tribe of Uganda yielded similar findings—neither heart disease nor levated cholesterol levels, despite a daily diet of 400g of animal fat. They also had no rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative arthritis, or high blood pressure.

Another African pastoralist culture is the Kalenjins of Kenya. Raw and fermented dairy products form the bulk of their diet. Not only are they free of chronic and degenerative diseases, they are world-renowned runners. ‘Athletes from this one tribe of 3 million people have won 40 percent of all the highest international honors available in men’s distance running,’ in track, cross-country, and road racing.

The Vegetarian Myth is also available as an audio book on Audible.com.