2 thoughts on “Dietary Fat”

  1. I claim no expertise on the topic, but I seem to recall reading very, very long ago (and I can no longer recall the title of the book) that one of the data points that started the government’s obsession with fat is that during the Korean War, it was observed during surgeries at field hospitals that large numbers of young, physically fit American men showed evidence of arteriosclerosis, some showing shockingly advanced cases–this despite the fact that they were of a generation born during the Great Depression, raised, in many instances, in shocking poverty before the war, then during the war fed a diet of whatever the wartime food rationing left available for the home front.

    At the time, it was (supposedly) decided at the top that the only possible explanation was that Americans have too much fat in their diets, and policy should be created to change this as a matter of public health. The possibility that some individuals are more genetically prone to arteriosclerosis than others, and, ceteris paribus, in some unfortunate individuals signs of it can appear in their bodies even before the age of 20, even when these individuals appear from a cursory examination to be physically very fit and not obese, was not, apparently, given any great consideration.

    I do know, however, from conversations with relatives who farm, that while hogs are normally fed a diet consisting largely of the farm family’s kitchen garbage and table scraps (though depending on the size of the family and the number of hogs this may not always be enough, unless one has made arrangements, for example, with a local school to pick up their kitchen garbage). And if you want hogs to put on fat to increase the amount of lard recoverable after the slaughter, you supplement this diet with a special high-sugar, high-starch “fattening” feed mix that is made largely of crushed or coarsely ground wheat and dried corn in equal parts, this mixture being the same one that scores of state Departments of Agriculture and the USDA have recommended for this purpose going back at least to the 1890s. One does not add fat to their diets. And I know that men are not hogs, and hogs are not men, but perhaps there is something to be learned here.

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