The Good Fat Cookbook - Hardcover

McCullough, Fran

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074322809X ISBN 13: 9780743228091

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

Synopsis

Good news. The good fats -- butter, chocolate, eggs, coconut, olive oil, avocado, fish and shellfish, among many other favorites -- are not only delicious, they're good for your brain, heart, immune system, hormones, skin, memory, and emotional well-being. Whatever you think you know about fat, forget it. After two decades of the low-fat diet trend, Americans are fatter -- and less healthy -- than ever before. For many, those torturous no-fat, low-fat diets are outright health hazards, contributing to everything from premature wrinkling and depression to hormone dysfunction and even cancer. In The Good Fat Cookbook, best-selling author Fran McCullough delivers the delicious news. Here is powerful evidence that not only have we been sold a bill of low-fat goods, but the foods we love to eat -- real butter, chocolate, coconut, whole milk and cream, nuts, avocados, cold-water fish, red meat, olive oil, bacon and eggs -- are actually good for us. Not only does fat not make you fat, the good fats slow the effects of aging, improve mood and memory, boost the immune system, and protect against catastrophic disease such as stroke and cancer. And the most surprising news of all: the right fats are great tools for weight loss -- they make you fuller faster and for longer and jump-start your metabolism. McCullough debunks fat myths and demystifies cutting-edge science, while exploring all aspects of the fat phenomenon, fork in hand. More than a hundred simple recipes -- Salmon Chowder, Tuna with Rice, Deep-Fried Coconut Shrimp, Parsley Salad with Avocado, Chicken with Olives and Oranges, Grilled Cheese with Oregano, Crisp Coconut Waffles, Avocado Cheesecake, and Wall-to-Wall Walnut Brownies -- put the good fats back on your table, and McCullough offers spirited advice on everything from the best cooking oils and tastiest canned tuna to nutritional supplements and testing for your fatty-acid profile. Her hundreds of thousands of low-carb fans will be overjoyed to see that most of the recipes here are perfect for them as well. Fran McCullough is the author of the best-selling The Low-Carb Cookbook and Living Low-Carb. She won a James Beard Award for Great Food Without Fuss and, since 1999, has been the editor of the annual Best American Recipes anthology series. A graduate of Stanford University, McCullough began her career as an editor, discovering Sylvia Plath, Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, and National Book Award winner Robert Bly as well as Richard Ford. She also edited and published a distinguished list of cookbook authors, including Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, and Deborah Madison. Her website address is www.blackdirt.net/lowcarb

About this title

About the Author:

Fran McCullough is the author of the best-selling The Low-Carb Cookbook and Living Low-Carb. She won a James Beard Award for Great Food Without Fuss and, since 1999, has been the editor of the annual Best American Recipes anthology series. A graduate of Stanford University, McCullough began her career as an editor, discovering Sylvia Plath, Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, and National Book Award winner Robert Bly as well as Richard Ford. She also edited and published a distinguished list of cookbook authors, including Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, and Deborah Madison. Her website address is www.blackdirt.net/lowcarb

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: The Truth About Fats

What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?

-- Phil Handler, President of the National Academy of Sciences, testifying about the low-fat dietary guidelines before Congress in 1980>

To begin, let's consider some basic nutritionally correct "facts," the ones we know so well we could repeat them in our sleep: · Fat makes you fat. · A big juicy steak is like a heart attack on a plate. · Canola oil is the healthiest cooking oil. · Coconut is a deadly fat that promotes heart disease. · Eat less fat, and you'll live longer. · Bacon and eggs is an artery-clogging, killer breakfast. · The most important thing you can do for your health is to keep your cholesterol level as low as possible.

Actually, none of these widely accepted "truths" is true. Not only are they false, but making food choices based on them will lead to some dire health consequences, despite what the U.S. government prescribes. In fact, almost everything you think you know about fat isn't true, unless you're an especially astute reader of cutting-edge science on the subject. Or unless you happened to read Gary Taubes's New York Times Magazine cover story on fat that questioned the conventional wisdom on the subject (July 7, 2002). What most of us have believed to be true -- and that includes doctors and other health professionals -- about fats and health is actually the result of a complex synergy of food industry lobbying, medical celebrity self-promotion, governmental intervention based on no sound science, advertising, a hyperactive health police with media visibility, and our own eager Puritanical desires to deprive ourselves in order to purge our sins of excess and earn the salvation of a healthy old age.

Now that we've had thirty years of margarine, fat-free milk, cheese-free cheese, inedible lean pork, Egg Beaters, dreadful dry chicken breasts, SnackWell's, and approximately fifteen thousand other new low-fat products (high-ticket items that are actually cheaper to produce than "real food" and have a longer shelf life), we should be much healthier. The president of the American Heart Association predicted in 1984 that if everyone ate low-fat, we'd eradicate atherosclerosis, the clogged-artery disease that leads to heart attacks and strokes, by the year 2000. Actually, we were moderately compliant; we did reduce our fat consumption from more than 40 percent of our total diet to 34 percent. Yet only the food industry has gotten healthier.

The incidence of heart disease has not declined, and obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed. We jettisoned our beloved eggs, bacon, cream, cheese, and red meat, and yet we haven't thrived. That's partly because, as we now know, or some of us have noted, dietary cholesterol affects blood cholesterol only by a factor of about 10 percent at most, and blood serum cholesterol is a very different thing from cholesterol laid down in the body's tissues.

High cholesterol levels themselves have come into question as a sure sign of impending cardiovascular disease. In 1991, an analysis of nineteen cholesterol studies from around the world revealed that for women, the higher the cholesterol, the longer the life. Recent research has shown that high triglyceride levels (over 100), combined with low HDL -- the "good" cholesterol -- levels (under 35) are much more predictive of heart disease, even if the "bad" LDL cholesterol level is low. (One way to pile on more of those bad triglycerides, as Surgeon General Koop has noted, is to eat a low-fat, high-carb diet.) It's possible to simultaneously lower blood cholesterol and increase the plaque cholesterol lays down in the arteries -- that can be done by consuming polyunsaturated oils, the very ones we've been urged to use for our health's sake. Only one kind of cholesterol actually clogs arteries, and that's oxidized cholesterol. Oxidation is a process a bit like rust. When you expose a cut avocado to the air, it quickly darkens: that's oxidation. You can stop this process quickly by applying an antioxidant -- lemon or lime juice in the case of the avocado, just as in the body you can stop the free-radical damage of oxidation by consuming enough antioxidants to disable them. Oxidation has a huge amount to do with your state of wellness, and I'll be discussing it in great detail later.

Why didn't eating less fat make us healthier? In his widely ignored first article on the subject, "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat," published in the prestigious journal Science (March 30, 2001), Gary Taubes explains that the science proving a connection between dietary fat and heart disease simply was never there in the first place. Hundreds of millions of dollars of research later, there's no proof whatsoever that eating low-fat will improve your health in any way at all. A study commissioned by the Surgeon General's office showed that a woman who died at the age of sixty-five and who had eaten a very low-fat instead of a regular diet all her life might possibly live as much as an extra two weeks -- though other studies suggest the number may be more like three days. It's hard to imagine that anyone who likes good food would jump for that devil's bargain: give up a lifetime of delicious food for two more weeks in your mid-sixties! On the contrary, the fourteen-year-long Harvard School of Public Health Nurses' Health Study and its two sequel studies indicate that total fat consumption has no correlation with heart disease risk and that saturated fats are little worse, if at all, than the carbohydrates the government's Food Guide Pyramid recommends as the basis of our "healthy" diet (and fat doesn't prompt the addictive response carbs do). And in the Nurses' Health Study, women who ate low-fat had the highest risk for breast cancer.

The Nurses' Health Studies were supported (at a cost of more than $100 million) by the National Institutes of Health, and yet no new dietary guidelines and no new food pyramid have emerged as a result of their findings (for one, that monounsaturated fats like olive oil reduce the risk of heart disease). It is, as Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard, the spokesperson for the studies, says, "scandalous." Perhaps equally scandalous is the fact that Taubes's piece never registered at all in the media, though it was mirrored by a similar investigative piece in the prestigious British journal Nature later that year that came to the same conclusions -- also completely ignored.

Although some separate elements of the low-fat theory are true (for instance, saturated fats of animal origin do have an elevating effect on blood cholesterol) the overall indictment of fat in general was never more than a theory based on connecting dots and claiming cause and effect -- a phenomenon that cholesterol researcher Utte Ravenskov calls false correlation. A benign explanation is that this theory is the result of a very human trait that's almost impossible to overcome. Dr. Dorothy Dinnerstein conducted gestalt laboratory studies at Rutgers University in the 1980s. Over and over again, subjects shown random elements on a field and asked what they saw inevitably connected them into a pattern and often assigned it a meaning as well. The chaos of unrelated elements seems too overwhelming to handle, so we mentally rearrange them. When powerful forces such as industry, the population's urgent wishes, and politics collide on such subjects -- the studies on synthetic hormones are a good example -- a momentum is established that overwhelms any objections about lack of scientific proof until the proof is undeniable. In the case of the antifat prescription, the motive was a bit dark; although the participants knew, says Dr. Willett, that there were good fats and bad fats, they thought the population wasn't capable of making such distinctions and would be much better served by a more simplistic message, even if it wasn't true -- as, indeed, it is not.

In the case of dietary fat, politicians and health officials eager to "do something" about our national health simply plunged ahead and made recommendations, connecting the isolated dots on their own authority with no scientific backup, even though some scientists warned them at the time that this was dangerous. Pete Ahrens at Rockefeller University testified to Congress that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets, so it's a crapshoot (his words were "a betting matter") who may benefit and who might be harmed. But the momentum was already established and the word went forth that fat was bad, very, very bad. Since this new paradigm was hugely to the benefit of agribusiness, relentless marketing did the rest. Spokespeople for various institutions, the ones you always see on television scolding the population for its unhealthy diet, backed up the message, doctors and nutritionists fell right in step, and millions of dollars' worth of advertising did not go for naught. We were hooked.

That's the benign story. To see the nexus of scientists, politicians, and food manufacturers working together to vilify natural fats and convince us that fake fats are healthy -- despite plenty of resistance from people like Dr. Paul Dudley White, the famous cardiologist -- read "The Oiling of America," by Dr.I guarantee a rise in blood pressure. (This article also explains how we got "imitation" foods approved by the FDA that don't require that word on the label.)

The sad-but-true fact is that there are no simple answers -- such as, cut saturated fat and you won't have any heart attacks -- because no one really knows what causes heart disease. There are at least a dozen credible theories, citing, among them, high homocysteine levels, high insulin levels, excess fibrin, inadequate thyroid levels, low magnesium, inflammation, and iron overload in the tissues. A low-fat diet is suspect for many researchers, as are trans fats (good fats gone bad, altered by hydrogen bombardment or high heat and chemical processing). All or some of the theories may work together, or one of them may turn out to be the answer, or the culprit may be something else altogether -- we just don't know yet. We do know, however, that eating low-fat resolves no health problems, so there's no credible reason to continue doing it -- and plenty of reasons not to.

Still, the low-fat dogma seems to have seeped into our very bones and become an article of faith impervious to reason. One simple explanation is that a number of famous careers have been made on low-fat and the investment of these media stars in the perpetuation of low-fat religion is huge. They include fat-phobe Dr. Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who refers to fat in general as "a greasy killer." At least Jacobson, who was a major instigator of the tidal wave of dangerous trans fats (especially those used in fast-food frying) in American food, has had the courage to reverse himself a bit and lobby the FDA for trans-fat labeling. As a result of the imposition of "healthy" fats on fast food, trans fats -- the dangerous ones -- climbed from 2.4 grams in a typical fast-food meal to 19.2 grams in 1992 -- not too much in the public interest. New York Times columnist Jane Brody has taken on low-fat as a personal crusade, though even she has recently introduced avocados and nuts into her diet and will no doubt write more favorably about fats as the pendulum swings back. Other high-visibility low-fat talking heads include Dr. Kenneth Cooper, Dr. Dean Ornish, and Dr. John Macdougall.

Another reason we haven't heard the truth about low-fat is that most researchers themselves have vested interests in the outcome of their work; usually they know what the results will be before they even get the grant, and there are very few completely openminded people in the health world who are willing to be proved wrong. One brilliant exception is Dr. Mary Enig, a former lipid researcher at the University of Maryland, perhaps the leading fats authority in the country, who has courageously insisted that the data don't support the low-fat assumptions and, worse, that the low-fat diet has had severe consequences for our health because it's deprived us of healthy natural fats and replaced them with dangerous trans fats. Researchers talk about these issues among themselves, and sometimes even publish books about them, but the message isn't heard over the din of the mainstream message.

The emperor has no clothes -- but pick up any mainstream newspaper or magazine and you'll read endless articles about the necessity of cutting fat, new strategies for squeezing more fat out of our diets, and admonitions to shape up our fat consumption, or die young. Meanwhile, the population gets fatter and fatter, there's an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, and we all continue to deprive ourselves of delicious food in the hope that we're saving our lives.

One result of our obsession with fat as the major health villain has been a cornucopia of reduced-fat, highly processed food that gives us a huge dose of trans fats, the damaged fats that become, in effect, poisonous, toxic to the cell membranes they're attached to. Studies have shown them to be key factors in heart disease (because among other things they raise LDL -- the bad cholesterol -- and lower HDL -- the good). They also inhibit insulin from binding to the cells, which creates blood sugar problems that lead to diabetes and obesity. About 90 percent of the American food dollar is now spent on processed food, virtually all of it contaminated with trans fats (look for the words "partially hydrogenated" or "hydrogenated," which appear on the labels of everything from peanut butter to cookies and crackers). Soon trans fats will have their own line on food labels.

A huge source of dietary trouble is the so-called "healthy" oils that have replaced the good natural saturated fats. That's because these vegetable and seed oil sources of polyunsaturated fats -- such as soy oil, corn oil, canola, safflower, and sunflower -- are very fragile and easily break down if they're not highly processed (and, if they are, they're full of undesirable omega-6 and trans fats and have lost virtually all their nutrients). When they do start to break down (usually in the bottle before they even get to the store), they develop, through oxidative damage, some alarming components called free radicals. These are the body's terrorists, ranging around at will and damaging the chemical structure of cells to produce vascular problems, a vulnerability to cancer, and general havoc. These little monsters are molecules that have lost an electron and are scrambling around to steal one from a molecule on a healthy cell, which then turns into a free radical itself. Free radicals can multiply exponentially this way, and they're capable of altering a healthy cell's DNA, or even killing it. Tobacco smoke and pollutants are major sources of free radicals (breathing itself is a minor source), but the trans fats in food -- and especially rancid fats, whic...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 074322809X
• ISBN 13: 9780743228091
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384