Vegetable fat not the route to a healthy heart, study finds

I'll take my chances with plant fats.

I love all fats except margarine. They taste terrible.

Fatty Okinawan pork is fabulous and delicious. It all depends on quantity I believe. Just do not over do anything and you should stay healthy.

So, how does lowering cholesterol levels increase the risks of heart disease? They didn't appear to explain that.

Because the long-accepted theory that high cholesterol levels increase the chance of heart disease has taken quite a beating lately. As have the assumptions that animal fats are bad for you, that margarine is healthier than butter, and the artificial sweeteners and fats help people lose weight.

It is becoming very apparent that doctors really have little idea what constitutes a healthy diet, and that government recommendations are to be taken with a grain of sea salt. Several grains.

Just eat real foods, not processed junk, with lots of raw or barely cooked veggies. You'll be ahead of the game.

The September, 2013 issue of Scientific American is dedicated to discussions of food. I found the interview by Kate Wong with Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham especially noteworthy.

"With our supersized brains and shrunken teeth and guts, we humans are bizarre primates......Humans, unlike any other animal, cannot survive on raw food in the wild, he observes. 'We need to have our food cooked.'"

After two million years of cooking food, we have evolved in such a way that we are now dependent on cooked food for our very survival. A sure way to lose weight, and to certainly hurt one's health, according to the theme of the article, is to switch to a diet of only raw food.

On the subject of heart health, it appears that much remains to be learned, but there is increasing anecdotal evidence that a strictly sedentary lifestyle is not conducive to a long and healthy life, whatever one's diet.

Omega 3 (saturated fats): Fish oil, grass fed animal fats, butter, coconut oils.

Omega 6 (poly-unsaturated): Soybean oil, Corn oil. Vegetable oils.

Margerine (synthetic butter) when heated (hot) in a pan does smell like plastic or burned motor oil. Heat even damages it more (unsaturates/oxidizes). Your worst fat is poly-unsaturated that has been heated at high temp for a long time --many fast food joints may use a poly-unsaturated (heated-heavily oxidized) fat for a week to even a month(s). =Those French fries are most likely unhealthy or damaging since your body with take those damaged (heavily oxidized omega 6) fats and store them somewhere since they are more difficult to process. =You are storing toxic inflammatory "oxidized" Omega 6 fats.

There are researchers (Mary Enig, et al) that have been saying this for decades. And for years they were called "nuts." But in the last few years many have turned away from industrial vegetable and seed oils and embraced unrefined coconut and pastured lard (among others). I call these oils "industrial" because at one time most of them were used only in industry and were not eaten. After WWII many of these oils were replaced by synthetic chemicals and so a new market had to be found for them.

Here is an interesting map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_life_expectancy

In Europe, butter-gobbling Northerners live just as long as olive oil-swilling Southerners.

Extra virgin olive oil is pretty good (mostly saturated) as long as it remains unheated or even low heat. Once heated it can become unsaturated. Many of these oils have a mix of the Omegas 3/6/9 etc. Want the higher Omega 3 ratio if possible.