Quotes from The Obesity Code - Part 5
From The Obesity Code, by Jason Fung, MD
Chapter 18: Fat Phobia
Page 203: “Current opinion holds that plaque develops as a response to injury: the wall of the artery becomes damaged, resulting in inflammation, which in turn allows infiltration of cholesterol and inflammatory cells into artery walls, in addition to the proliferation of smooth muscle. The narrowing of they artery may cause chest pain (also called angina). When plaques rupture, a blood clot forms, which abruptly blocks the artery. The resulting lack of oxygen causes a heart attack. Heart attacks and strokes are predominantly inflammatory diseases. rather than simply diseases of high cholesterol levels.”
Page 204: “The second major problem was the inadvertent triumph of nutritionism, a term popularized by the journalist and author Michael Pollan. Rather than discussing individual foods (spinach, beef, ice cream), nutritionism reduced foods to only three macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins[,] and fats. They were then subdivided further as saturated and unsaturated fats, trans fats, simple and complex carbohydrates, etc. This sort of simplistic analysis does not capture the hundreds of nutrients and phytochemicals in foods, all of which affect our metabolism. Nutritionism ignores the complexity of food science and human biology.”
Page 205: “Dr. Keys made the unnoticed and unintentional claim that all saturated fats, all unsaturated fats, all dietary cholesterol, etc., are the same. This fundamental error led to decades of flawed research and understanding. Nutritionism fails to consider foods as individuals, each with its own particular good and bad traits. Kale is not the same nutritionally as white bread, even though both contain carbohydrates.”
Page 207: “It’s actually a minor miracle that vegetable oils were considered healthy at all. Squeezing oil from non-oily vegetables requiring a substantial amount of industrial-strength processing, including pressing, solvent extraction, refining, degumming, bleaching[,] and deodorization. There is nothing natural about margarine and it could only have become popular during an era in which artificial equaled good. We drank artificial orange juices like Tang. We gave our children artificial baby formula. We drank artificially sweetened sodas. We made Jell-O. We though we were smarter than Mother Nature. Whatever she had made, we could make better. Out with all-natural butter. In with industrially produced, artificially colored trans-fat-laden margarine! Out with natural animal fats. In with solvent-extracted, bleached[,] and deodorized vegetable! What could possibly go wrong?”
Page 209: “Saturated fats are so named because they are saturated with hydrogen. This makes them chemically stable. The polyunsaturated fats, like most vegetable oils, have ‘holes’ where the hydrogen is ‘missing.’ They are less stable chemically, so they have a tendency to go rancid and have a short shelf life. The solution was to create artificial trans fats.”
Page 212: “A comprehensive review of all the studies of high-fat dairy finds no association with obesity, with whole milk, sour cream and cheese offering greater benefits than low-fat dairy. Eating fat does not make you fat, but may protect you against it. Eating fat together with other foods tends to decrease glucose and insulin spikes. If anything, dietary fat would be expected to protect against obesity.”