Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness

Butter is Nature’s Perfect FatThis is an important book. In a clear and readable fashion, Sally Fallon Morell shows why saturated fat and cholesterol are not the villains medical authorities make them out to be.Parents of infants and young children will want to read Chapter 8 first., “Remember the Little Ones: Why Children Need Animal Fats.” Beneath its title in the table of contents she writes: “Children need animal fats for normal growth and the development of their brains. But at the two-year checkup, doctors warn moms not to give saturated fats to their toddlers, and whole milk is forbidden in school lunches—despite consistent science showing that children on low fat diets are more likely to suffer from allergies, asthma, learning disorders and obesity. We are literally starving our children in the name of phony science.”The human brain continues to make billions of new brain cells after birth for some number of years, and they need saturated fats and cholesterol to form healthy, waterproof cell membranes. She points out that “Nearly half of the fatty acids in human breast milk are saturated, suggesting that dietary saturated fats are critical to the development of infants and young children. Saturated fats are so important during these critical stages of development that their abundant presence in breast milk is universal among mammals.”In the first chapter, “The Greatest Villains,” she tracks the unfolding demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol. It began in 1912 with the pernicious marketing of Crisco—its name comes from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil—by Proctor and Gamble. The company promoted this hydrogenated trans-fat, first used to make candles and soap, as a “healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.” She next addresses the fake science of cholesterol studies in rabbits, who as herbivores are not designed to digest animal fats and cholesterol. Then there is the Framingham Heart Study, where largely ignored follow-up reports contradict its initial findings that high cholesterol blood levels cause heart disease. She shows how the 1977 McGovern Report advocating a low-fat “Dietary Goals for the United States” and the 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference have played fast and loose with the science.For the chapter titled “Not Guilty as Charged” she writes: “Animal fats get the blame for everything from cancer to ingrown toenails—and none of these accusations is true! The science shows that saturated animal fats actually protect us from chronic disease.”The last chapter’s title is “The Queen of Fats: Why Butter is Better.” Below it she writes, “The queen of fats, butter is loaded with nutrients the body needs to be healthy and happy. Starve yourself of butter during the day and you’ll crave ice cream when nighttime rolls around. Modern processing technologies cannot come close to providing in spreads and margarines the range of vitamins and lipid components present in butter. Nature’s fat for optimal growth and development.”Fallon Morell confirms that butter contains a variety of healthful saturated fats, and it also contains the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2. Fallon Morell devotes a separate chapter to them, with this caveat: “Critical vitamins A, D, and K2 occur uniquely in animal fats—and Westerners are woefully deficient in these nutrients. The body uses vitamins A, D and K2 for everything from proper vision to growth to fertility.” These vitamins help produce and activate matrix GLA protein that removes calcium from coronary arteries supplying blood to the heart.The healthiest butter comes from cream that free ranging, contented cows eating grass in sunlit pastures produce. This butter has a natural deep yellow color indicative of high levels of Omega-3 fats and fat-soluble vitamins. Butter from industrially confined cows denied access to green pastures has 10 to 13-times less vitamin A and 3-times less vitamin D than grass-fed cows. My wife and I consume Amish butter. Amazon has it.As President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and Editor of Wise Traditions: in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts (the Foundation’s quarterly journal), Sally Fallon Morell commands an encyclopedic knowledge of butter and saturated fats. She states, “No one studied butter more thoroughly than Dr. Weston A. Price. Throughout the 1930s, he analyzed thousands of butter samples shipped to him from all over the world.”She dedicates Nourishing Fats “To the memory of Mary G. Enig, PhD” (1931-2014), her long-time colleague, friend, and coauthor of key articles and books on fat, one which is titled Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The healthy Alternative to Trans Fats (2005). More than 30 years ago, Dr. Enig exposed the connection between trans-fat margarine and heart disease and cancer. The medical establishment first ignored her, then vilified her, and finally years later treated her findings concerning trans-fat as an unsurprising, obvious fact.Sally Fallon Morell is a skilled writer with a sharp scientific mind. She cites 707 up-to-date references in this book, which I was pleased to see includes this one: “Statins stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure: pharmacological mechanisms,” by Okuyama H, et al., in the March 2015 issue of Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology (volume 8[2], pages 389-99).Orthodox claims that animal fats are bad for us wilt and become thoroughly discredited when held up to scientific scrutiny.The bottom line: “Start eating butter, lots of butter!”Note:I address this subject in my 2011 Lew Rockwell article “Enjoy Saturated Fats, They’re Good for You!” at: http://archive.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller38.1.html. It is drawn from a talk I gave on saturated fats earlier that year at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque. This 53-minute talk is available on YouTube available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRe9z32NZHY&t=2s (there have been 325,000 views of it so far). Some of the slides I used in that talk are reproduced in this LRC article.Graduating from medical school in 1965 and pursuing a 40-year career as an academic member of the medical establishment performing and teaching heart surgery, I unquestioningly adhered to the low-fat creed. For far too long. Then, in 2005, I came upon an article that Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon (now Sally Fallon Morell) wrote titled “The Oiling of America,” first published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. This article stimulated me to look more carefully into the matter and discover that the conventional wisdom regarding saturated fats and cholesterol is false.

Incredible research. Mountains of it. If you think politics is full of lies, wait till you see the errors connected to medical health reporting on TV and in leading magazines. For example, on page 77, you'll read how one headline proclaimed, "High Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy." It was all blamed on high-fat. WRONG. Here's why...As Researcher Sally Fallon points out, "There's just one problem with the press release: the rats in the experiment were not fed fat, they were fed oil. The rats in the study encountered problems typical of those on diets high in industrially-processed vegetable oils." Further, on page 84, she refers to several studies showing how saturated fat can protect the liver from the effects of alcohol and other toxins, such as Tylenol. Learn why saturated fat is a healer for your liver and kidneys.In addition, on page 102, Ms. Fallon covers the lie that we can get all the vitamin A we need from vegetables alone. Yes, your body can convert beta-carotene from vegetables into active vitamin A. Yet Sally Fallon points out that almost 50 percent of females have a genetic variation that greatly reduces the levels of the enzyme (BCOM) that converts beta-carotene to its active form. In addition, compounds in beta-carotene supplements could lower the activity of active vitamin A. Popular advice is often scary wrong. For example...0n page 76, Ms Fallon explains why "Impotence is a commonly reported side effect of cholesterol-lowering regimens, because the body makes testosterone out of cholesterol." Oh great, follow popular advice and end up biologically castrated. Also learn how popular health food advice can damage children in the womb. Ancient people had sacred foods that created super-healthy babies. We never eat them because they contain animal fats, and one result is kids born with heart defects. (pg 132 onward)If you're a low-fat follower, this book is a 1,000 pound bunker bomb of unknown science that could save your heart -- and help you avoid immune collapse or kidney failure. So-called healthy vegetable oils are definitely immuno-SUPPRESSIVE. The book is so packed with science you will need a yellow highliter to mark it up. Could the index be better? Absolutely. Sally, please, please upgrade it. But that's minor to getting your life saved.As a professional journalist, I have read hundreds of health books. This one is a shining diamond -- a trend-changing work. Nothing like it anywhere.

I love history and really enjoyed reading about the traditional foods and their preparation of cultures from around the world. This book is full of interesting information, but is very easy to read and understand (not technical). Sally also includes a lot of interesting footnotes throughout the book to further explain various parts. It's also clear the author has a sense of humor. There were a number of times I laughed out loud reading this. The book is mostly information about the cultures, divided into a separate chapter for each. At the end of the book, it summarizes how to apply this knowledge in our own lives and includes recipes. She also references a number of books throughout and has a very long bibliography of books I will probably be looking up in the future. One author I was happy to see a mention of in the chapter on the American Indians is Charles C. Mann. I have read his 1491 book (here on Amazon; a fantastic book) on what the Americas were really like before Columbus. It's very eye-opening, and I wish the information was known by the masses. I was very happy to see that Sally included his information rather than just going with the "mainstream" fake knowledge that the Indians were all tree-hugging hippies living in the midst of thousands of miles of virgin wilderness.This book is mostly information, not solely a cookbook. If you want more information about traditional diets, read Weston A. Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. And if you want more recipes, check out Sally's books about broth or Nourishing Traditions.

Great Book !!!

Well written and researched book. Excellent information.

excellent book :: must have

This book came out some years ago, and I only just got round to reading it, but it certainly repaid the time. Sally Fallon probably has more all-round knowledge of food than any other individual living. Many of her original articles were written with Mary Enig, a now sadly deceased lipid biochemist responsible for some of the research that originally revealed the dangers of trans fats. However, Sally herself in her writings comfortably draws on an extensive knowledge of food science while also being steeped in the lore of ingredients, food preparation and cooking and informed by an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ethnographic, anthropological and historical material. Being bilingual in French, she also has access to Francophone material and was early interested by French writers who had covered the fascinating topic of fermented foods.The best chapter is perhaps the one on Australian Aborigines. These people have often been described as having a Palaeolithic lifestyle, as Sally notes (and, in fact, lacked the bow-and-arrow, sometimes seen as typical Mesolithic technology). However, the archaeological and historical records reveal them to have been not the wandering hunters and gatherers living a hand-to-mouth existence of the colonial imagination but knowledgeable and resourceful managers of their environment. This section of the book draws heavily upon Bill Gammage’s brilliant “The Biggest Estate on Earth” but refers to dozens of other sources, too.This chapter also gives plenty of opportunity for a few digs at Professor Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet. This diet, and the low fat diet that the dietetics industry has with scant evidence pushed for years, are targets throughout the book. (Other diets that also often get publicity, such as the vegetarian and vegan diets, don’t come in for so much debunking—probably because they make too easy targets and are relatively uninteresting.) The Paleo Diet and versions of the low fat diet, such as the so-called Mediterranean Diet, have more plausibility and more academic clout, and so are worth the scrutiny. Do people living around the Mediterranean Sea really eat as some academics, from Ancel Keys onwards, would have us believe—a low-fat, cereal-grain heavy diet—and is this the source of their supposed health and longevity? Did Palaeolithic Man eat as Cordain supposes—thriving on lean meat and eschewing salt and whole categories of foodstuffs (cereal grains, legumes and dairy foods), and is this kind of fare consistent with our evolutionary past and the physiology that has left us with? These are questions worth asking.It turns out that Australian Aborigines gathered starchy plants, including the seeds of cereal grasses, quite extensively, grinding them up and making a kind of bread from them. We know this from the diaries and letters written by European settlers at the time, and archaeological finds of grindstones underline the practice. Aborigines, contrary to Cordain’s beliefs (and Professor Kerin O'Dea’s), also valued, sought and knew where to find fats. They also drank sodium-rich fresh blood from kills and used salt (and when they couldn’t obtain salt added the ashes of sodium-rich plants to food). They did not avoid legumes, but knew how to prepare these and other foodstuffs that can be deadly when not treated properly. Dairy products? North American Indians, it’s noted elsewhere in the book, would take the curds from the stomach of a sucking bison calf, and Australian Aborigines had similar practices. So much for the Paleo Diet food-avoidances: they don’t stand up to research in the ethnographic and historical record.One diet that doesn’t come in for criticism in the book is the low carb diet in its many variants. This is probably because it is appropriate as a treatment for obesity and diabetes and is certainly a healthy option in a “real foods” form if industrial seed oils, sugar alcohols and other artificial sweeteners, and packaged “keto” products are avoided. Nevertheless, while healthy traditional populations didn’t eschew healthy fats, such as butter, ghee, lard, beef tallow, coconut oil and olive oil, neither did they avoid or minimise carbohydrate-rich foods. Accordingly, Sally’s Nourishing Traditions Diet, while not hostile to carbohydrate management for those who need that, is more permissive than the low carb diet. In fact, one could say that the diet, while it eschews packaged and industrialised “fake foods” is considerably more permissive and less puritanical than ALL the diets that come in for criticism in these pages. One might say God or Nature put a lot of good foods into this world and few traditional foodstuffs need to be rejected, although some take knowledge to prepare.There’s also a chapter spent looking into the claims made about the so-called Blue Zones and the variant of the low-fat diet that’s recommended on the basis of what people in these places are said to eat. This turns out to be like shooting fish in a barrel. The claims made don’t to say the least chime with firsthand accounts of these places from other sources. And there are many other problems with claims made (including population movement on Ikaria, which undermines the statistical claims made about centenarians there). Sally remarks caustically that the Blue Zones project is an exercise in damage-limitation: people are becoming more interested in traditional foodways and it is an attempt to head that off. This is a highly sceptical judgment, but then we do live in a wicked world, so who can say?There are a very few places where the author’s usually extensive knowledge may be at fault or where her enthusiasm may have outrun the evidence. Lager beer is mentioned as a traditional English beverage: in fact, it’s a German invention. The diet of the Copper Age Iceman, whose mummified body was found in the Alps, is lauded as following a balanced diet, when the terrible state of his teeth, as revealed in the dental autopsy, seems to raise questions about what he was eating. More bizarrely, it’s stated that the maximum percentage of protein in the human diet is 20%. While the Nourishing Traditions Diet is generally friendly to protein-rich foods, like meat, fish, eggs and cheese, there’s less recommended than on some other diets, such as the Paleo Diet or Zone Diet—and some versions of the Low carb diet (for example, Dr Mike Eades' Protein Power Diet). However, data in the “Ethnographic Atlas” famously indicate that hunter-gatherers eat in the range of 19% to 35% of calories as protein. The lower figure given in the current book seems to reflect a concern that a too generous consumption of protein in the context of a low intake of vitamin A can result in depletion of vitamin A. How valid this concern might be isn’t established, though, and it’s unfortunate that the figure given here puts the book at odds with the ethnographic data.A good survey by a very well-informed and talented writer and full of arcane and interesting material. Highly recommended.

Very well explained!

Fantastic book. Haven't finished it yet, but it's really well researched, very interesting information, and while I've seen others complain that it's a soft-cover book -- I bought it for the information, not an extra piece of cardboard! I'm really happy with this purchase.