image: Wikimedia commons (link).
The twentieth century witnessed a massive and concerted campaign to destroy traditional diets and replace them with what has come to be broadly known today as the "western" diet.
The impetus for this massive effort to change the way people eat was supposedly new "scientific" research supporting the new "healthier" dietary patterns.
In actuality, the supposed "science" behind many of the biggest changes introduced during the twentieth century can be shown to have been massively flawed (if not deliberately dishonest) -- and the results of these supposedly "scientific" changes can now be seen to have been disastrous.
In his important book Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs and Sugar -- Your Brain's Silent Killers, discussed in this previous post, Dr. David Perlmutter provides detailed evidence that many of the most-influential studies which were used to recommend massive changes in the way people eat (and which were responsible for creating what can be called the "modern western diet") were flawed in their methodology and their analysis, and led to deleterious changes in the way people eat, resulting in the rise of many of the health problems that we see today.
Discussing the massive push to convince the entire population to stop eating as much meat and replace it with carbohydrates, and to stop cooking in animal fat and replace it with vegetable oil, Dr. Perlmutter explains that this campaign was supported by studies which can now be seen to have been completely flawed in their reasoning. He writes:
In 1900, the typical city dweller consumed about 2,900 calories per day, with 40 percent of these calories coming from equal parts saturated and unsaturated fat. (Rural families living and working on farms probably ate more calories). Theirs was a diet filled with butter, eggs, meats, grains, and seasonable fruits and vegetables. Few Americans were overweight, and the three most common causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea and enteritis.
It was also around the turn of the twentieth century that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) began to keep track of food trends, noting a change in the consumption of the kind of fats Americans were eating. People were beginning to use vegetable oils instead of butter, which prompted food manufacturers to create hardened oils through the hydrogenated process so they resembled butter. By 1950 we had gone from eating about eighteen pounds of butter and a little under three pounds of vegetable oil per year to just over ten pounds of butter and more than ten pounds of vegetable oil.
[. . .] In 1956, the American Heart Association began pushing the "prudent diet," which called for replacing butter, lard, eggs, and beef with margarine, corn oil, chicken, and cold cereal. By the 1970s, the lipid hypothesis had become well established. At the heart of this hypothesis was the unyielding claim that cholesterol caused coronary artery disease.
This naturally motivated the government to do something, which led to the release of the "Dietary Goals for the United States" by the Senate's Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in 1977. As you can imagine, the goals aimed to lower fat intake and avoid foods high in cholesterol. "Artery-clogging" saturated fats were deemed especially bad. So down went meat, milk, eggs, butter, cheese, and tropical oils such as coconut and palm oil. This perspective also paved the way for the billion-dollar drug industry's focus on lipid-lowering medications. At the same time, health authorities began to advise people to replace these now-bad fats with carbohydrates and processed polyunsaturated vegetable oils, including soybean, corn, cottonseed, canola, peanut, safflower, and sunflower oils. Fast-food restaurants followed suit in the mid-1980s, switching from beef fat and palm oil to partially hydrogenated (trans fat) vegetable oil to fry their foods. Even though the USDA has since converted its pyramid to a plate, it still communicates the idea that "fat is bad" and "carbs are good." 95 - 96.
This switch to vegetable oils may have been especially deleterious, given the results of new studies which are suggesting that soybean oil -- now the most-used "vegetable oil" in the united states and the second-most worldwide -- may contribute directly to a host of health problems, including dysfunction of the hypothalamus, which is critical for regulating weight gain in the body, as well as for reproductive function and even mother-child bonding.
Here are links to recent studies which caused the lead author of one study to declare bluntly:
"If there is one message I want people to take away, it is this: REDUCE CONSUMPTION OF SOYBEAN OIL."
That quotation is found at the end of the first article linked below. The other two links lead to studies which have been published in scientific journals.
The third article linked above begins with this sentence:
"Soybean oil consumption is increasing worldwide and parallels a rise in obesity."
The second article linked above explains the astronomical rise in soybean oil consumption in the united states during the twentieth century:
The recommendation for decreased saturated fat consumption, as well as other factors, led to a dramatic, >1000% increase in consumption of soybean oil in the US from 0.01 to 11.6 kg/yr/capita between 1909 and 1999. Approximately 40 million tons of soybean oil were produced worldwide in 2007, which is about one half of all the edible vegetable oil and one-third of all fats and seed oils produced. Soybean oil is heavily used in processed foods, margarines, salad dressings and snack foods, and is the oil of choice in many restaurants and fast food establishments. While there has been extensive investigation of the role of various other dietary components in obesity, especially SFAs, soybean oil has received relatively little attention.
The fact that there has been a greater than one thousand percent increase in soybean oil consumption in the united states between 1909 and 1999 is astonishing -- and the results of the studies linked above suggest that this startling rise in soybean-oil consumption may be directly related to the sharp rise in many other serious problems including obesity, diabetes, insulin-resistance, and even neurological disorders including Alzheimer's, autism, anxiety, and depression.
While soybean oil now makes up about 50% of all edible vegetable oil worldwide, other articles linked above and USDA studies show that soybean oil makes up around 60% or moreof the oil consumed in the united states, where soybean oil is the most-consumed of all edible oils.
When you see the words "vegetable oil" on a list of ingredients, you can be fairly confident that you are looking at a product containing soybean oil -- especially in the united states.
In addition to data suggesting that soybean oil consumption is directly linked to the rise in obesity and diabetes, the above articles also report that recent studies find evidence that soybean oil consumption has "pronounced effects" on the hypothalamus -- pronounced negative effects.
Professor Margarita Curras-Callazo of UC Riverside and lead author of the most recent study explains: "The hypothalamus regulates your body weight via your metabolism, maintains body temperature, is critical for reproduction and physical growth as well as your response to stress."
That quotation is found in the first article linked above. That article goes on to say:
The team determined a number of genes in mice fed soybean oil were not functioning correctly. One such gene produces the 'love' hormone, oxytocin. In soybean oil-fed mice, levels of oxytocin in the hypothalamus went down.
The research team discovered approximately 100 other genes also affected by the soybean oil diet. They believe this discovery could have ramifications not just for energy metabolism, but also for proper brain function and diseases such as autism or Parkinson's disease. However, the researchers noted that there is no proof the oil causes these diseases.
Despite that caution about "no proof" that soybean oil directly causes these diseases, one of the researchers concluded, as noted previously, that the one message people should take away, it is the imperative: REDUCE CONSUMPTION OF SOYBEAN OIL.
That may not be so easy to do, given the massive adoption of soybean oil in processed food, as well as in restaurants as a cooking oil.
In addition, the third report linked above notes that due to the widespread use of soy as a feed for animals, the meat and the fat of those animals fed massive amounts of soy will contain the components found in soybeans and soybean oil as well! They note that even studies done in the modern era which find health problems associated with lard may actually be picking up the effects of the soybean oils in the lard of the animals which were fed soy as a feed, and that problems blamed on the lard may actually be caused by the linoleic acid from the soy.
That same report also notes that previous studies have found high levels of linoleic acid in farm-raised salmon which are fed a diet of soy.
As one report quoted above points out, there has been very little research done on the possible links between soybean oil consumption and the well-known problems associated with the western diet such as obesity, despite the exponential rise in consumption of soybean oil that has taken place over the last century, spurred to a large degree by the intense campaigns to convince people that cooking and consuming "vegetable oil" is good for them (and eating the traditional way is bad for them).
This complete lack of attention on the potentially disastrous health impacts associated with soybean oil is extremely regrettable -- and extremely suspicious.
Now, however, studies are beginning to be done on the ways that soybean oil interacts with the body, with the genes, and with the endocrine system -- and the results are shocking, to say the least.
These studies indicate that every single man and woman might want to strongly consider looking further into this subject for themselves, and become familiar with the data that is being produced by these recent studies, and decide what they want to do about it.
It may not be easy to do, but these results strongly suggest that individuals and families may want to take steps to reduce consumption of soybean oil, by looking at ingredients on foods that they buy to avoid foods containing soybean oil or the ubiquitous "vegetable oil" (which usually means soybean oil), selecting grass-fed meat, and choosing wild fish rather than farm-raised fish.
Then, people might also want to take a look at the dietary guidelines which continue to be pushed by various agencies and interests, and ask just how such disastrous changes have been foisted upon the way we eat, and why there has been such a massive push over the past one hundred years to obliterate traditional diets.