On 8/13/15 8:31 AM, SeaNymph wrote:
snipped for a bit of brevity

There seems to be a rash of medical reversals lately, concerning things
like milk, sugar, salt, etc. I think that a lot of what we hear and
read is nothing more than fear mongering, based on little real world
facts. That being said, I simply don't think the government should be
telling people what to eat and drink. It's not their business and when
it comes to facts, they aren't exactly on the top of the believable
list, imo.

The problem is the research industry. A scientist has to publish or
perish, or, one like Albert Schweitzer may want to publish so the public
will know what he has learned. He has to publish in certain
periodicals. Many times, they won't publish unless they get the copyright.

For practical purposes, that can mean the research is unavailable to the
public. Subscriptions are expensive. If you aren't part of an
organization that can afford subscriptions, and you don't have access to
certain libraries, you may be out of luck. Besides, a corporation or
government who found certain information threatening, could probably
bury the research by buying the copyright. At one time, I think
copyrights expired in 17 years, but now they can be extended for
generations.

Schweitzer published a paper saying he'd treated hundreds of thousands
of Gabonese. Their primitive diet looked unhealthful to civilized
people. Besides, it was a tobacco-growing region, and they smoked so
much that he often treated them for nicotine poisoning. Cancer was
endemic in industrial nations; I think colon cancer was the biggest; yet
Schweitzer reported that he didn't see a single case of cancer for many
years, until they began eating a western diet.

It has been about a century since he published it, but I think it's
still unavailable to the public.

A British doctor began treating Inuits about 1880. They traded for
firearms, ammunition, tobacco, and other items, but stubbornly refused
to buy western food. Their diet included lots of blubber. For fifty
years, he found no cancer and very little heart disease. IIRC, his
first cancer case was in 1930, after they'd finally begun eating food
from industrialized nations.

As of the 1890s, pathologists had been advancing medical science for a
couple of centuries. They'd found infarctions in various organs, but
never a heart. The foremost pathologist in North America published a
paper on the first known heart infarction, in the 1890s, four years
after corn oil came on the market.

I think cottonseed oil came on the market in 1898. The motive was
profit: cottonseed was a byproduct, available for almost nothing.
Hydrogenated cottonseed oil, Crisco, came on the market in 1912, IIRC.
Suddenly there was an epidemic of the strange new disease, the heart
attack. One contemporary writer noted that it happened to people who ate
a lot of pastry.

Cancers increased, especially lung cancer, which had been rare. It
happened to women, too, and they didn't smoke. About 1937, when the
prices of butter and lard jumped, so did sales of vegetable oil and
hydrogenated shortening.

In WWII, Japan cut us off from a traditional saturated cooking oil,
coconut oil. Soy oil took its place. By the end of the war, vegetable
oil was a major, profitable industry. The rates of heart attacks,
cancer, and obesity became alarming and continued to grow.

Now that butter, lard, and coconut oil were again abundant, the
vegetable oil industry set out to discredit them through propaganda from
research not available to the public. They had a scientist try a diet of
fish filets and blubber. I don't think he did it many days. He announced
that his blood analysis showed it was unhealthful.

That was the start of the propaganda that everybody should eat vegetable
oil because saturated fat caused heart attacks. The problem was
malnutrition, like using a diet of bread and water to prove bread was
harmful. Such propaganda worked in a culture where the public accepted
knowing only half truths because of copyrights.

IIRC, it was about 1970 that Harvard Medical School determined that
partially hydrogenated vegetable oil was deadly to the heart. I'm sure
they weren't the first, but when Harvard spoke, people listened. Not in
this case. The vegetable oil industry had lots of money for junk
science and propaganda.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, founded by a
food-industry lobbyist, kept spreading propaganda that the delicious
traditional fats used by restaurants caused disease, while hydrogenated
soy oil was good for you. Eventually, McDonalds caved in and switched
from tallow to hydrogenated soy oil. When governments outlawed it, CSPI
representatives said they were ignorant slobs who didn't know any
better. The Wall Street Journal disagreed.

Obesity? According to the USDA, per capita consumption of all kinds of
food except vegetable oil has remained pretty constant since 1940.

Men began smoking less about 1955. Statistics said an individual's
chance of getting lung cancer declined fairly quickly after quitting,
but the rate among men rose for nearly 40 years as cigarette consumption
declined. It began declining about 1992. Now it's a lot lower, but I
think women's rates have continued to climb. If people who had never
smoked often got lung cancer, that was supposed to be because somebody
else smoked.

The Adkins Diet, advocating more meat and animal fat, became popular in
the early 1990s. Probably more men than women were swayed. Research has
shown that saturated fat protects the lungs. As long as the public were
kept ignorant, the vegetable oil industry could blame cigarettes.