The 4 fats built America 🇺🇸

We are swimming in a sea of cooking oils, be it toxic seed oils or even healthier cold-processed options like EVOO and avocado oil. This is not normal or good for a variety of reasons.

Explaining how strange this is to a millennial is like pointing out water to a fish: while we’ve become used to our oily diets, this is a radical shift in human nutrition.

Before 1930, humans ate 4 animal-based fats:

The fats that built America:

• LARD

• Butter / dairy

• Egg yolks

• Beef / lamb tallow

That’s it, and the same goes for most of human civilization, besides a few Mediterranean outliers who may or may not have consumed large quantities of olive oil.

Lard was #1. Pigs can thrive on literal garbage, so they were cheaper to grow and slaughter, lard was used for basically everything.

Butter was more expensive and came next, then eggs for baking and emulsifying and tallow went along with meat and in stews etc.

What’s wrong with oil?

Oils have numerous issues that solid fats do not, yet their convenience and the shared belief that they are healthier has made them the norm.

Some key issues:

• Easy to fake, very very hard to detect fraud (20 out of 22 avocado oils are fake, UC Davis study)

• Rancidity, spoilage and shorter shelf life

• Higher contaminants and microplastics due to massive surface area w/ plastics in supply chain (would you drink a credit card smoothie?)

• Oleic acid found in olive oil is likely more obesogenic than saturated fats (topic for another newsletter)

Fresh oils from great sources are a solid choice, but they’re exceedingly rare. It’s much more apparent if something is wrong with the butter a restaurant buys, than their olive oil.

PUFA in lard and eggs

Today American chickens and pigs are universally fed a diet based on corn, soy and seed oils to fatten them up.

Because they have a single stomach like us, these polyunsaturated fats end up stored in their body tissues, giving them a fat composition of 20% PUFA, compared to around 5-8% on heritage diets.

This is why butter and tallow are the current scout favorites.

But life expectancy…

These people lived short, disgusting lives mired in pig fat, correct? Yes and no…

We have doubled life expectancy since the early 1900’s, but that’s only because medicine has gotten very good at treating specific things, namely:

• Infant mortality

• Infectious disease

• Trauma and accidents

When you control for deaths from these causes, you realize that our low-saturated fat diets and big-pharma’s infinite candy store of pills and injections have amounted to almost nothing.

These populations were thinner, healthier and free from chronic disease and obesity.

Their food also tasted much better

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