This is a show that dispels the mainstream facts about cholesterol, dietary fat, and heart disease; and the unintended consequences of a low fat diet.
Listen in as head coach, Mark Ottobre interviews Alan Watson, the author of Cereal Killer and 21 days to a Healthy Heart,as they uncover:
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- The health risks of a low fat diet
- Why high carb diets cause heart disease
- The REAL bad fats
- The facts on cholesterol
- Total cholesterol is not a factor of heart disease
- What to ask your doctor about cholesterol
- Satin drugs aren’t proven
- The list goes on…
This is political nutrition at its finest!
To say that fat (or cholesterol) causes heart disease is an outrageous lie and it’s time you learn the truth.
Learn how to eat fat, and still stay lean!
Related Posts
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- Achieving Victory Over A Toxic World – Enterprise Fitness Podcast
- The Vegetarian Myth – Enterprise Fitness Podcast
Mark: This show is proudly brought to you by www.maximusmark.com.
Hi folks, it’s Maximus Mark! (And) welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information but in a good way, it’s Maximus Radio.
Today, I have one of those shows. You know, the ones, the ones where we shine a lot on mainstream nutrition, nutritional and medical eras. Today, I have on the line Allen Watson, author of both “Cereal Killer: The Unintended Consequences of the Low Fat Diet” and “21 Days to a Healthy Heart”. Allen was also the founder of a herbal and nutritional supplement business in 1989. Allen is the founder of www.dietheartpublishing.com where many articles dedicated to good nutrition and health can be found. Both of these books are available on Amazon so make sure you grab a copy. So, let’s welcome Allen to the show.
Welcome Allen, great to have you on.
Allen: Thank you Mark, I’m glad to be on the show with you.
Mark: We’ve got plenty of questions here. Actually, the way I first heard about you is on Facebook by Mike ???, he actually posted one of your Q and A’s about fat and cholesterol and it was absolutely a brilliant read. I’m sure the listeners will get a lot of value.
So the first question that we have, how did you get into researching and writing about heart disease and health?
Allen: Sure Mark. We started a supplement business in 1989, we manufactured some formulas. In the industry, you start receiving publications and of course we have the bipolar environment here where we have Dr. Dean ???in one hand recommending a very low fat diet and then we have Dr. Atkins recommending a very high fat diet. There was as much confusion within the nutrition industry as people have in this country about whether they eat right, whether or not how many eggs a day can I eat. (And) in hindsight, I think it is an obligation of my customers, a lot of our orders were 1 to 800 at that time, I thought I have an obligation to get out the truth. Why would you buy supplements if you know what to eat, right? So I went to the Atkins-Whittaker debate in New York City in 1997, Whittaker is a physician from California advocating the low fat diet like the ???and of course Atkins was recommending a high fat diet. I thought, this would be beneficial to medical doctors say 2-hour debate and I was really impressed with Dr. Atkins, he cited a lot of clinical data. He talked about his clinical practice which happened in 1997, he had been more than 20 years, even 30 years and he was rosy-cheeked and healthy-looking and Dr. Whittaker appeared to be 50 pounds overweight, he was uncomfortable and he didn’t have much clinical evidence that a high carbohydrate diet would prevent obesity or diabetes or heart disease. So, in April of ’97, I was doing a newsletter, I decided that in fact Atkins is right the clinical data was persuasive and I started doing more research and by 2002 and then I published “21 WDays to a Healthy Heart”, which was a pro-Atkins, pro-traditional food, pro-high fat diet.
Mark: In 2011, there’s a big surge of the Paleo style of eating, would you say you’re an advocate of Paleo nutrition?
Allen: Yes, I am.
Mark: There has been a bit of controversy just recently on Facebook with some of my friends on Facebook where there’s been question about colon cancer and meat consumption, what’s your take on that?
Allen: Meat consumption is something low-hearted generalizing about because like any food there are differences in quality and when I’m talking about meat consumption it’s like the food that my grandfather served. He was a dairy farmer in Northern Minnesota, they had lamb, they had beef, they had pork especially in the winter, they made their own butter from cows fed on pasture, of course they had chickens, the skimmed milk was fed to the pigs, they were able to get their cooking fat or lard from that. (And) my grandfather looked to be 88 years old, he wasn’t on any prescription drugs, he died of pneumonia during a harsh Minnesota winter. So, I mean that’s anecdotal but this has been repeated over and over again when you’re eating good quality red meat, good quality animal feed, it protects you, these were considered protective foods until the low fat era began. Now, if you’re going to overcook meat, if you burn it on a barbecue, grill or you buy highly processed meats, sausage that has nitrates, food colors and sugars, that’s a different story unlike any other contaminated food, animal foods could cause cancer and other problems too. But to specifically answer your question, there’s a lot of data from Harvard here in the US, the physicians, health studies, the nurses’ health study, where in the nurses’ health study, 80,000 nurses were followed for 10 years and the nurses who consume the most red meat, who consume the most fat and cholesterol had no more cancer than the nurses who consume the least. In fact, the nurses who consume the most fiber, who had the highest carb intake, had the highest levels of breast cancer. I think the Harvard study is definitive that there’s no association between meat eating or eating more fat and protein and cancer.
Mark: Right. (And) one more Facebook question until we hit the main verge of the interview, question from Mike ???, he asked, “What’s your take on Paleo diets in different sub-population, say for example, for children and seniors, does it need to be tweaked?
Allen: I think so. I mean, that’s always true. We’re more different than alike. We have varying insensitivities to carbohydrates. I think a good example, right in Minnesota, Northern Minnesota where some of our temperatures are coldest in the country, and you’re breakfast might be a little bit different in Northern Minnesota than it would be in Southern California. So, depending on the climate, the type of work you do, I think our diets can vary. I viewed Paleo diet and that trend as really a variation of Atkins, the traditional hunter-gatherer diet or the diet that we consumed as humans for couple million years did not include corn, soy beans, cereals, grains, it was more fish, red meat, the carbohydrates were berries and tubers and things like that so, we always need to individualize our diet but I’m a proponent of a Paleo or traditional diet consistent with what our ancestors consumed.
Mark: What changes could you possibly make in a young child? Would there be any changes? Would you give more carbohydrates to a child do you think?
Allen: Maybe even less. Children need saturated fat, they need cholesterol. If we look at human mother’s milk, that’s the highest cholesterol food on earth, I don’t think God made a mistake. Milk is high in fat and cholesterol for that reason that growing bodies need a lot of fat and cholesterol. I think that’s a mistake now where mother’s giving 6-month children like cereal or rice cereal, it may be appropriate if they can put their own milk or full fat raw milk in it to balance the carbohydrate but children until the age of 2 need a high fat, high cholesterol diet, and of course we’re talking about natural fat, not highly processed foods.
Mark: So, in mainstream nutrition, they tell you fat is bad for you. What’s wrong with that statement?
Allen: I think the primary thing that common sense thing that’s wrong with that statement is that we’re made out of fat and protein and water, of course. That is non-negotiable. We have trillions of cell membranes in our body, everyone has true layers of fat, the fatty biolators. (And) these membranes are the key to our cellular health, are like the body’s police force, the fatty membrane controls what comes in and what goes out of the cell. The fats in this membrane, phospholipids, are 50% saturated fat. Twenty percent of the weight of a membrane is cholesterol. So, that and including saturated fat and cholesterol, constitute the water-proofing and the structure of the bodies, so we need to eat fat and proteins to replace the structure, to remodel our bodies. Our liver, our organs are remanufactured, they’re not made up of carbohydrates so we have zero biological requirement for carbohydrate and we need fat and protein to build and maintain our bodies.
Mark: What is a good fat and what is a bad fat?
Allen: First of all, I think we should say that in the United States, in the beginning of 1961 when the American Heart Association first came up with the high carbohydrate diet, all fat was bad. They wanted us to skip on fat and because the studies that we’re trying to validate that never did, there’s never been any conclusive evidence that dietary fat is bad, they had to tweak it and they had to start dividing up cholesterol is good and bad and fat is good and bad, so, the change from all fat is bad to good bad is just the proponents of the lipid hypothesis, are just simply trying to tweak, they have to keep tweaking it to try to make it valid. But a good fat is a natural fat, let’s take butter fat which is the most complex fat on earth different fatty acids in butter. There are 12 different fatty acids in butter. There are eight different saturated fats in butter.
One of them of course isloricacid which is a dominant fat in coconut. So we have all fat in food is a combination of saturated and unsaturated and these are the natural fats that our bodies easily recognize and process. All of these natural fats are good. The bad fats are the trans fatty acids that came about when we started to hydrogenate vegetable oil and then when we started taking these vegetable seeds like soybean and canola which is made from grape seed and sunflower, safflower and corn. When we started to crush these seeds and to pull oil from them, those highly processed seed oils are bad fats. They’re bad because it takes high heat or high pressure and even chemicals like ???to separate the oil from the seed. (And) then we’re talking about our traditional diets, our ancestral diets, nobody in your country or mine, consumed soybean oil or corn oil or canola oil in 1910. These modern highly processed vegetable oils are truly bad and the hydrogenated fats are truly bad. All of the restaurants and fast food enterprises serving French fries and chicken nuggets, they’re deep frying these foods in these highly toxic vegetable fat whether it contains trans fats or it doesn’t, it’s the same thing, these are unstable Frankein-fats that we shouldn’t consume.
Mark: So, in other words, all animal fats are completely fine and when people go nuts separating yolks from eggs and skin from chicken, it’s not really needed, eat the chicken with the skin?
Allen: Right. Certainly, the idea to remove the chicken skin, it’s usually stated that it’s saturated fat and you remove it, and as they should know, chicken fat is 70% unsaturated fat, it’s not even saturated, it’s a combination of course. But chicken and pork fat contain a very important fatty acid called ???acid. ???is a monounsaturated fat and it kills bacteria and virus. So if you remove the skin from the chicken, you’re getting less ???acid. In other words, that’s what they’ve done, in telling us not to eat coconut, not to eat palm, not to eat lard, not to eat chicken skin, not to eat butter. They’ve removed the antimicrobial fatty acids from our diets and in exchange, we were told to eat fats like canola and soybean that do not contain antimicrobial fats.
Mark: Do you think it’s one big mistake or do you think there’s more at play?
Allen: I think initially Mark, the state of knowledge in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s in the 1977 when the federal government first came out with low fat guideline and started recommending unsaturated, polyunsaturated fats. I think at that time, politicians in this country, Sen. George McGovern had a bipartisan committee that had staffers that actually developed the first guidelines. Our first low fat diet guideline was actually written by political staffers that didn’t have a scientific background and they were really responding to the politics of that time. So I think, initially it wasn’t something we would call evil, but now, it’s 2011, now in the US we have 75 or 80 million people who are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. We have diabetes in this country since 1980 when the guidelines were made normal, diabetes has triple, type 2 diabetes, obesity has more than double. Now in the last 5, 10 or 15 years we have started to discover the new lances in cholesterol and metabolism. We know a lot more now about HDL, LDL, BLDL. Now we know for sure, but the 2010 dietary guidelines that came out in the Unites States, here, do not reflect any of that new knowledge. (And) now, I would say it’s evil. Now, it’s unconscionable that we’re not shifting back to traditional higher fat diet when we know the harm that’s being caused by a low fat-high carb vegetable oil fuel diet.
Mark: Do you think it’s corporate monopoly at play, controlling what government’s doing?
Allen: Yes it is, and I’ll give you an example. The 2010 dietary guidelines, there was a 13-member committee that was appointed more than 2 years ago, there was no hearing, no public discussions, suddenly we have a 13-member dietary guidelines committee. (And) a lot of people, I should say, in this country sat, written testimony, listened to the hearings, read the transcripts, we got involved in the grass roots manner thinking we could change these guidelines but the 13 members were kept behind closed doors. There is an organization, it is called The International Food Information Council Foundation, now that’s a so-called public-private partnership, they were heavily involved in the selecting the 13-member committee. This foundation is funded by Pepsi, General Mills, or should we say “Generous Mills”, Mars Candy Co., and ???Dan the Yoghurt Co., and their yoghurt has no fat and has 27 grams of sugar in it. So this so-called private-public partnership, select the 13 members and General Mills they’re headquartered here at Minnesota, they have a vice president on this foundation. But when the 13-member committee was announced, a professor Dr. Joanne Sullivanfrom the University of Minnesota, where I graduated from, she was picked to be one of the members and guess what? She announced on the first day that she was going to be the carbohydrate chairperson and she testified during meeting 1, day 2 and the first thing she said is that carbohydrates are the basis of a healthy diet, that’s written right into the guideline. She said there’s no reason to grate carbohydrates, there’s no reason to single-out corn syrup, no reason to look at the glycemic index of carbohydrates, in other words, she made every decision about what would be in the final guidelines and the reason that she was selected is that all of her funding come from General Mills. General Mills and ???headquartered here, give millions of dollars to the university, in effect the food industry in Minnesota owns the nutrition department and they made darn sure that the carbohydrate share would be one of their own.
Mark: Wow! So it really does go to that level of complexity. That’s exactly right. That’s going to be very hard to change, isn’t it?
Allen: Yeah, it’s going to be hard to change but I think a lot of us in the United States, I’ll say I certainly did, we learned a valuable lesson the days we’re loaded. So for 2015, we’re not going to waste our time waiting for that committee, it’s very important that the US Department of Agriculture be removed from the process of creating dietary guidelines because USDA and their dieticians are closely connected to this International Food Information Council which as I mentioned is funded completely by food companies. So, we can’t let them roll the dice, as long as we let them roll the dice, nothing’s going to change.
Mark: Is this related, I don’t know if you’ve looked into it, but codex element Ariusand the implementation of food law?
Allen: I’m sorry Mark, can you say that again?
Mark: I’m not sure if you’ve looked into it, is this all related to codex element Arius, the UN trying to bring in a food guideline for the rest of the world?
Allen: I don’t think so necessarily. I think they’re two different organizations without any specific ties.
Mark: Okay. So let’s move on to cholesterol. Can you tell me simply, what does cholesterol do?
Allen: Cholesterol is almost conditionally essential. There are some people that do not synthesize cholesterol very effectively and as I’ve mentioned earlier, cholesterol makes up 70% of the cell membrane biolators. So, cholesterol is very vital. Cholesterol basically water proofs our cells and makes them just as pliable enough. So we have trillions of membranes and cholesterol is part of every membrane. Cholesterol was so important that every cell in the body except nervous system tissue can make cholesterol. So, our bodies have to make anywhere from 12 to 18 hundred milligrams of cholesterol daily to supply what’s needed by the body. (And) in this country and in the dietary guideline since 1980, we’ve been told to limit our cholesterol to less than 300 milligrams per day. Now think of it, Mark, if we have to limit our dietary cholesterol to less than 300 milligrams, but our bodies need 1500 milligrams everyday, then instead of eating foods that our bodies need, we’re forcing our liver to make this cholesterol and our livers’ have more important things to do. Of course, cholesterol is the precursor molecule to Vitamin D, cholesterol is the grandmother hormone, cholesterol precedes ???, and all of the sex and steroid hormones. Cholesterol, I think you could say, is the defining molecule of animal life. Mosquitoes have LDL, they just don’t brag about it.
Mark: What would you say the optimum levels of cholesterol are?
Allen: I’ll give you an example, I’ll answer it this way, in the United States, if you have total cholesterol over 200, it’s a disease to be treated by drugs. I had a physical in the last year, my brother did, virtually everybody I know who get a physical is told they have a disease, high cholesterol. In Europe, there was a study called “Monica”, and that was study of lipid levels including cholesterol and heart health in 20 different European countries. People in Switzerland had the highest longevity and the lowest rates of heart disease along with the French. But the Swiss also had the highest average cholesterol levels 265 milligrams per deciliter. So, isn’t that interesting that in the United States, I’m not sure about Australia, 265 is a disease to be treated with drugs, in Switzerland, it’s a marker for good health and longevity. This was discovered actually even back in the 1950’s by a Dr. John Gothman working at Berkeley, that we don’t really have cholesterol in our blood. When we measure cholesterol, we measure vehicles that carry cholesterol like LDL which is called bad cholesterol, but LDL is not cholesterol, LDL is low density lipoprotein which delivers cholesterol. If we think about how important it is that our bodies need to produce 1500 or 1800 milligrams every day, it’s produced I the liver, that has to be delivered from the liver to the cells in the body, that’s what LDL does. LDL is not bad cholesterol, it is a delivery vehicle. HDL is good but it’s not cholesterol, it delivers cholesterol back to the liver. The cracks of the matter, Mark, is that atleast half or more of the people who have a heart attack and die, don’t have elevated cholesterol, they don’t have this disease called high cholesterol, they have total cholesterol below 200.
It started with Ansell Keys at the University of Minnesota and it goes right on to this day, the mania about cholesterol lowering has created this huge industry for Staten drugs. We’re spending billions and billions of dollars medicating elderly people with Statendrugs that may or may not lower their cholesterol but in fact lower their life expectancy.
Mark: Right. So, it’s complete and utter madness.
Allen: That’s total madness. I’m hoping that 20/30 years from now, people look back at cholesterol lowering as the gravest mistake of medicine in the last 200/300 years.
Mark: I remember reading an article on our website a while ago that basically said what you said then that cholesterol is basically the founder of all hormones, so to optimize things like testosterone and the sex hormones, and of course testosterone helps build muscles, burn body fat and all those good things, you should eat more fats containing cholesterol, so basically that’s 100% right. I just want to put a nutshell on it so the listeners really get it.
You mentioned Ansell Keys, who is Ansell Keys? Why was he important in the fat and cholesterol lie?
Allen: He was a professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota and he actually started in the 1940’s and he happened to be in Italy after World War II and discovered that some various populations in the Mediterranean area had what he perceived as low fat diet and lower rates of heart disease. (And) he studied this situation in Japan and found that they had low fat diets and lower rates of heart disease. So, he was the first to hypothesize that it was cholesterol and saturated fat, actually at that time, all fat, in the diet that would predispose us to coronary heart disease and he conducted a couple of studies, the 6-country analysis, and then the 7-country study, and what’s interesting about the 6-country analysis, which came out in about 1953, we’ll use example of Japan, the Japanese had lower rates of heart disease and low consumption of fat, in the United States, had high rates of heart disease and high intake of fat. Here’s the thing though, so he could draw a straight line, a linear relationship between mortality from heart disease and fat intake, the problem is that in order to draw that nice straight line, he had to ignore, of the 22 countries, he only showed 6. He ignored France, for example, which had a high fat diet and lower rates of heart disease. He ignored Mexico which had a high fat intake and lower rates of heart disease. So, he selected data, he selected the countries and data that would prove his hypothesis and he wasn’t a nice guy, contemporaries complain about his manner of method, the important thing though is he was a member of the board of the American Heart Association and by 1961, he had persuaded the American Heart Association to adopt his low fat-high carbohydrate diet based on his 6-country analysis which was clearly flawed. (And) the good example is that to go back to the Japanese, after the World War II, they were lucky to eat. The Japanese didn’t have a lot of food, they had a low fat diet, but they have a low sugar diet. They didn’t eat a lot of processed foods and they have very high rates of stroke. So, Keys was conducting epidemiology, not cause and effect. He was only looking at one thing, he wanted to prove that he was right and he did it by selecting data. In 1961, when the American Heart Association accepted his low fat diet or high carbohydrate diet, there were 7 board members, quite a few of them on the board, were professors at other universities who got all of their funding from food companies. There’s a Jeremiah Stamwer, Northwestern University in Chicago, he was an advocate, a supporter of Keys, all of his funding came from Masalaand FlechesMargarine. There was a Frederick Starefrom Harvard, his funding came from the Cereal Institute, Nabiscoand other food companies. In other words, in 1961 when American Heart Association came out with this diet that we’re beset today, it was food company paid researchers that made the vote so Keys could prevail. In 1980, when the dietary guidelines came out, the low fat guidelines, the exact wording from the 1961 American Heart on fat and cholesterol, the 300 milligram lipid on cholesterol, went right into our guideline and guess what? They’re there today. We’ve had the same restriction on dietary fat and cholesterol for 40 or 50 years, but today the difference is that now we’re a country and increasingly a world that’s getting fatter and sicker by the decade.
Mark: When you go out and present this information to doctors who haven’t been exposed to this information before, do you find as much resistance that people want to hold on to their belief that carbohydrates are good for you and that’s what you should be eating?
Allen: There is still total resistance. If you go in to a vitamin store or health food store and pick up a magazine whether it’s Delicious or Total Health, it is full of anti-fat, anti-butter information and the guidelines that just came out are virtually identical to 1980. When I went to my doctor, I’ve had very few doctor visits in the last 40 years but I thought I should have this lipids done, my HDL was 66, which is good, you want it over 60, my triglycerides is 82, you want them under 100 but my cholesterol was 265. My doctor insisted that I need to go on a Staten drug, I said, “What about my HDL? What about my triglycerides? Why don’t we talk about these things?” (And) you know what Mark, she didn’t really know what triglycerides were. She didn’t know. The public may be brainwashed but these doctors unfortunately have been programmed by their education and their education in large part has been framed by the interest of food and drug companies that control the curriculum not only in medical schools but also in nutrition departments at the high school and college levels throughout the country.
Mark: So what do you think is the biggest link to heart disease? Is it C-reactive proteins in relation to triglycerides and HDL?
Allen: With heart disease, now more and more, and even in the mainstream, we’re starting to see the metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome is the higher blood sugar, elevated triglycerides, triglycerides are blood fats made in the liver by excess carbs, low levels of HDL, protruding abdominal fat, high blood pressure, this cluster of symptoms is called metabolic syndrome and the two most important parts of that are high blood sugar and high circulating insulin. So, if we have a breakfast of three eggs, fried and buttered or lard, maybe a couple of lamb chops, protein and fat, we’re not going to raise our blood sugar.
That breakfast doesn’t call for insulin and by eating that fat in the morning when we’re in mild ketosis anyway, we’re giving our body permission to burn fat. If we eat good natural fat, we’re going to burn fat. But now, if we have a breakfast of a sugary cereal or any boxed cereal raises blood sugar, people put skimmed milk which has milk sugar, they might have a banana and a glass of orange juice, that excess sugar, that 40 or 50 grams of sugar, now, goes into the body, goes into the blood, the liver has to turn that into fat, that’s called triglycerides. When you’re body makes triglycerides and loads it into the blood, you’re depressing HDL, that is the link to heart disease, obesity, diabetes. Diabetes, 80% of diabetics die of heart disease. So, diabetes and heart disease overlap 80%, the common denominator of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are high blood sugar and high insulin levels. The majority of people who have a heart attack and die of sudden death have either low or average cholesterol levels but they’re going to have higher blood sugar, higher insulin and higher triglycerides level.
Mark: So let me ask you this, I go into my doctor, I got my blood test, the doctor says I have high cholesterol it’s 265, what then do I say to the doctor? What are some points that people can take home to challenge their doctor on?
Allen: What I would do is bring a black marker and just cross out the total cholesterol. It doesn’t mean a thing really. All cause death rate increases when your total cholesterol goes below 180. People who are dying of cancer, second cause of death, typically have total cholesterol of 120 or 130. Low levels of cholesterol are associated with cancer, heart disease, suicide, accident, leukemia, things like that. Remember the Swiss. The longest lived people in Europe, their average cholesterol is 265, so it’s perfectly okay as we age, we would expect our cholesterol to slowly increase. (And) cholesterol between, let’s say, 180 and about 330 can be perfectly normal. What you want to do is immediately look at fasting glucose, that’s the most important number, optimum is about 87 or 88. Dr. Atkins always said 95 is the very highest, when you go over 95, you’re at risk of death from heart disease starts to increase in a linear manner. (And) I should note at 110 fasting glucose, you’re diagnosed as pre-diabetic and at 125 it’s full blown diabetes. So, blood sugar which needs to be in a narrow range, let’s say 75 to 95, when you go over 95, you’re developing heart disease. Now only carbohydrates raise blood sugar, only carbohydrates are call for insulin, so, our blood work, our elevated triglycerides, our blood fats and our depressed levels of HDL are related to carbohydrate, not fat, intake.
Mark: Let’s move on to a different topic, I’m very fascinated by it. What is the back story of canola oil? In my understanding, it was Gamble and Procter who first started the canola oil craze, it basically took off from there. Can you give us a background on that?
Allen: Canola, which is short for Canadian oil, they show that name because I don’t know if many people buy an oil that’s called rapeseed oil. Canola is actually genetically modified rape seed and rape seed was always only an industrial oil. You can actually use it as a pesticide in your garden in small amounts. So they genetically modified rape seed to reduce certain fatty acids in it and when they reduce those fatty acids, it increased the monounsaturated ???acid, which is the dominant fat in olive oil. So, they took rape seed, which has a lot of polyunsaturates like soybean, genetically modified it to make it look more like olive oil. Here’s the problem with it, one, it’s all genetically modified, two, it stinks and to deodorize canola, it has to be heated over 300 degrees, and when the heat and dominantly unsaturated oil to those sort of temperatures, it’s not edible anymore. Canola is edible. The deodorizing also turns some of the unsaturated fats into trans fats, but it’s not on the label because they check for the trans fats before the deodorization process. So, if you see canola no trans fats, that’s not true. It will have trans fats because it was deodorized after the check. Whether some of the harm, the inflammation, high sugar causes inflammation, high Omega-6 or high linoleic acid, causes inflammation. Canola does have a lot of monounsaturated fat which has been modified but it has a lot of linoleic, polyunsaturated linoleic acid which we find in soybean and sunflower. Unsaturated means unstable, so these are chemically unstable. When you get oil out of the seed using hexane or high pressure or high heat, you damage the oil. So, these oils are not fit for human consumption. They’re far worse than we realize. (And) they should be strictly avoided. The best fats are the more saturated or monounsaturated fats that you find in what we traditionally cooked with, coconut, palm, lard, butter, and Indian ghee. The Indians use ghee, which is basically clarified butter with the moisture removed, for thousands of years. It was their safe cooking fat. Now there’s a Crisco of India, I can’t think of the name right now, and as the Indians are using this Frankein-fat, this shortening, they are now, I think they’re second to China in diabetes rates in the world. So, our edible oil industry in this world promoting these unsaturated fats for cooking and exporting them to developing countries is spreading diabetes and inflammatory chronic diseases throughout the world.
Mark: Do you think there’s a political factor applied to keeping it in the market?
A: Absolutely. If we didn’t know the absolute truth in the 60’ , in the 70’s about the processing of cereal grain into boxed cereal, the processing of soybean into an oil, genetically modifying rape seed into something called canola, if we don’t know the detrimental effects then, we know them now. They’re well-documented and there’s a shift under the way. More and more medical doctors, Duke University for example, they’re starting to return to Atkins or more traditional higher fat diet. They’re getting away from recommending these polyunsaturated fats. The shift is on and the people that are resisting it and that are trying to hide the truth, are the people making millions and billions of dollars at our expense.
Mark: Yeah, definitely. Let’s switch gears and talk calcium. When I tell clients to cut out on things like commercial milk or commercial dairy, the first thing they always say is “Where am I going to get my calcium from?” Can you talk a little about calcium and the magnesium relationship and why perhaps supplements with calcium is a bad idea?
Allen: Calcium is abundant in a wide variety of foods, it’s not just dairy. Dairy can be a good source of calcium if we consume cheese made from raw milk. Raw milk of course has all of the enzymes intact, when we pasteurize the milk, we destroy the enzymes. When we pasteurize milk, we modify the amino acids like lysine as denatured the most, calcium shifts from one form to another. So, it’s important to point out that dairy is a very healthy food when it’s raw dairy, the type of dairy that we had throughout much in our history, but when you pasteurize and kill the enzymes and alter the amino acids, dairy becomes, like canola, something to avoid. But you can get cheese made from raw milk and those cheeses of course provide Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, provide plenty of calcium. Cabbage provides calcium. Salmon and various seafoods provide calcium. There’s calcium and magnesium in green leafy vegetables. Calcium and magnesium are fairly widely distributed, raw dairy is a good form. But here’s the problem, it is that doctors and nutritionists recommend that we supplement about 1200 milligrams of calcium and often they don’t even mention magnesium. Multiple vitamins have 2 parts calcium and 1 part magnesium. Fortified foods, yoghurts, non-fat yoghurts and cereals and other fruits that are fortified with calcium, so it’s a marketing yemet. People have fear of fat but they also have this fear that they’re not getting enough calcium. (And) if you supplement with calcium or eat too much food that’s high in calcium and not enough magnesium, what happens is calcium migrates into soft tissue where magnesium is loss. Calcification or hardening of the arteries is calcium ions replacing magnesium in the soft tissue. So it’s very, very vital that we do not take supplements, cheap supplements that have too much calcium and not enough magnesium. I don’t think there’s any reason to supplement with calcium if you’re eating a wide variety of whole foods. Magnesium is a little harder to come by. In some parts of the world, there’s magnesium in water. I should point out, calcium and magnesium and red meat, pastured animal products have calcium and magnesium. So we shouldn’t supplement with calcium. If you supplement with one mineral it should be magnesium ‘cause that will tend to balance any excess calcium. Magnesium, there are good forms like ortateand aspartate that are easier to absorb. I think it’s important there’s an ionic magnesium, that is magnesium in trace minerals. Mineral supplementation is very tricky but if you do supplement with one mineral, I would make it magnesium. (And) I would be cautious about using any pasteurized dairy products because they have too much calcium and it’s been altered. That’s the real problem. I think if you could drink a glass of full fat fresh raw milk everyday, even people who think they are lactose intolerant, will do fine because the enzymes hadn’t been destroyed and you’re getting calcium in original form.
Allen: (And) you’re getting the fat that you need to absorb calcium. You can’t absorb calcium without fat and especially fat soluble Vitamins A and D. So, dairy is good for calcium if it’s raw, when it’s pasteurized, it flips to the other side and becomes harmful.
Mark: Yeah, for sure. (And) what role does potassium play?
Allen: Potassium and magnesium are the two most abundant intracellular minerals. So in our heart muscle, potassium and magnesium are most abundant, not calcium, potassium and magnesium. But potassium is widely available in all foods, it’s hard to eat and not get enough potassium. Magnesium is the one to watch out for. It’s probably never proven to supplement with potassium. It is abundant within our membranes, within our cells, intracellular. But when we have a deficiency, an intracellular deficiency, it’s more typically magnesium, and that’s when calcium then migrates into the heart muscle cells. I believe a heart attack at a cellular level is calcium replacing magnesium making a cell hard and basically dead. To protect your cell from heart attack is to keep your magnesium levels high and that would be emphasizing magnesium-rich foods which include seafoods, beans for people who can tolerate carbohydrates, red meat, even milk has magnesium but again, processing is the enemy of food, too much processing, too much heat. If there isn’t magnesium in the soil and it’s not in the food, these are all the things we have to consider.
Mark: What are the most important supplements for general health and protecting your heart?
Allen: I have been in the supplement business for a long time. I become weary, Mark, about people calling on the phone saying, “Gee, I’ve been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, what should I supplement with?” and my question begin with, “What did you have for breakfast?” I think it’s far more important. The most important thing we have to do is to eat high quality protein at every meal, make sure we have high quality natural fat because you don’t utilize protein without fat, so having a hearty breakfast that includes eggs or fish or salmon patties, homemade soup, a breakfast that keeps our fat burning. When we wake up, we’re in ketosis and we’ll stay in ketosis with food and keeping our blood sugar within that narrow optimum range, the only way you only do that is with your food choices. But we may find ourselves, people over 50, people over 60 as we’re relearning how we eat, we may need supplementation and I think a good form of magnesium is most important. In Dr. Atkins’ clinic, mostly people over 40 or 50, he did an intracellular test of magnesium, not a blood test, it’s always fine unless you’re nearly dead, but in intracellular test for magnesium, 9 out of 10 people were deficient in his clinic, over a 30-year period. Atkins said diabetes is simply a magnesium deficiency. We need magnesium to metabolize carbohydrates. (And) we need zinc as well. They emphasize eating up to 65% of our calories as carbohydrates and those carbohydrates don’t necessarily have magnesium especially the refined ones. So, we give up magnesium, we give up zinc, to metabolize a high carb diet.
