Why We Need Animal Fats with Author Sally Fallon Morell
October 14, 2017
We’re joined by Sally Fallon Morell, founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of best-selling cookbooks Nourishing Traditions and Nourishing Fats among many more. Sally is dispelling myths about animal fats and instead sharing why they are critical for our health, from protecting us from heart disease, helping with cholesterol and critical for fetal development, among so much more. Listen in!
Transcript:
CASSIE: Welcome Dishing Up Nutrition brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We're a company providing life-changing nutrition education and nutrition counseling. I'm Cassie Weness registered and licensed dietitian. I am in studio this morning with my colleague Kara Carper who is a licensed nutritionist. We are both so pleased to be hosting today's show because we have a special guest we have with us today. Joining us by phone the author of Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness.
KARA: Good morning and listeners I just want to refresh your memories regarding some of our special guest books. Sally Fallon Morell She has authored the books Nourishing Broth. Well first of all Nourishing Traditions is the one that she coauthored with Mary Enig some other books are Nourishing Broth, The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care, The Nourishing Traditions Cookbook for Children and the popular Eat Fat, Lose Fat. Sally Fallon Morell is also the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. She's a very busy lady. She's making a huge difference in the world of nutrition. We're really pleased to have her on today.
CASSIE: Yes absolutely and it is our pleasure to welcome our special guest Sally Fallon Morell to Dishing Up Nutrition.
SALLY: Oh thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
CASSIE: You are welcome. Sally you have put together an amazing book called Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. You know as I was reading the book personally I found it very noteworthy that you are stating over and over how we need animal fats to stay healthy because back a couple of decades ago now when I was in dietetics school in college all that was taught about animal fats was to avoid them. Our textbooks basically said animal fats caused heart disease and sadly we still have clients today at Nutritional Weight & Wellness who are afraid to use butter or are afraid to eat a steak because that message is still in the media today. We still read it in newspaper articles. Some of the medical professionals are still speaking this message. But as you point out in your book this message is not supported by accurate research.
SALLY: That's right. It was never supported by research. It was actually a marketing ploy by the vegetable oil industry going back over a hundred years. And the idea was to demonize the competition to make people feel guilty about eating butter and to think it was sort of vulgar to use lard and that persists even today.
KARA: You know Sally, speaking of you know research today. Can you just talk about why we need animal fats and particularly to prevent heart disease, you know there's such a history about heart disease and how the incidences have increased when people switched away from animal fats like butter, lard, eggs and cream and they switched to eating oil margarine soybean and cottonseed oil.
SALLY: And spreads, I always like to include these vegetables spreads. Well when if you go back to the early 1900s we had very little heart disease in this country and most people ate used animal fats. Most of the fats are being used for animal fats. And then as the vegetable oils came in these heart disease began to grow up and people noticed the connection they said look we've got these new things called vegetable oils and especially the partially hydrogenated or hardened vegetable oils used to make Crisco and margin. And we think we need to look at this because you know the trends are the same. They're going in the same direction. So the vegetable oil industry really got on their marketing horse so to speak and they started to blame heart disease on cholesterol and saturated fat, which are key components of animal fats but they're not in the vegetable oils. And there are a number of reasons why the animal fats actually protect you against heart disease. One is that they're stable. They don't create oxidation. And it's the oxidized cholesterol in your blood that starts the buildup of plaque in the arteries. It's one of the factors. But more importantly and this is always what I stress, the vitamins that you get from animal fats and that you can get nowhere else actually protect your arteries and your heart. They help your heart, which is a muscle, to work properly and the fat soluble vitamins especially vitamin K prevents the buildup of calcium in the arteries and the calcium that makes the arteries hard. That gives you hardening of the arteries.
KARA: So the vitamin K protects against calcium hardening arteries.
SALLY: Right. Vitamin K puts calcium where it belongs into the bones and to keep them hard and prevents the calcium from going where it doesn't belong which is the soft tissues like the arteries.
KARA: But what you're saying is we have to get vitamin K from an animal source.
SALLY: We do, and the best sources are bird fats, you know chicken fat, goose fat, duck fat, lard is a great source of vitamin K, butter, egg yolks, cream, whole milk and cheese, cheese is another wonderful source of vitamin K. All of these foods that we're being told not to eat are actually foods that can protect us against heart disease.
CASSIE: Right. Thinking of all those wonderful foods you just mentioned and in reading your book too it really made me think back to those delicious foods that my grandmother would have grown up on as a young child. She's going to turn 97 in a couple weeks. Still a sharp mind a great memory. She grew up on those wonderful foods.
SALLY: I hear stories like that all the time. Yeah they made their biscuits with lard. They cooked with lard. Americans five or six times more butter in those days than they do today. So these are the kinds of fats that build strong bodies and keep us healthy all our life.
CASSIE: Yep. And how lucky her generation was to have had that foundation of those foods. But I know you know my grandma never switched away from butter. I know that she was a farm lady and loved a lot of those real foods but she did switch to using Crisco when she became a mom I think partly because it was it was marketed as being a cleaner product partly because she was told it was a better healthier choice. I would love it if you would enlighten our listeners on how Crisco was created and how Proctor & Gamble really made it so popular.
SALLY: Yes, but you know your story is actually the same as mine. My mother never switched away from butter. We always had butter I'm very grateful for that. But she used Crisco.
And I think because they created this impression that it was vulgar to use lard and all the advertisements stress that if you use lard your house would smell funny and it was dirtier. And they even said that your children would grow up with better characters if you used Crisco instead of lard. So they knew how to punch all the buttons of the up and coming middle class American housewife. I mean they didn't eat very skillfully. So Crisco was developed mainly by Proctor & Gamble. They were candle and soap makers back in the 1800’s. And what they did was figure out how to get the oil out of cottonseed. So the seeds were a waste product so they could get them for practically free. And they had the new stainless steel press they could get the oil out when that oil comes out of any seed whether it's a soybean corn or whatever it's this awful smelly black gunk. And they figured out how to clean it up and then they figured out how to take this oil and harden it by this process called hydrogenation or partial hydrogenation so they could use it in soap and candles. Well electricity came along in the late 1800’s and there was less and less demand for candles.
So they said well what are we going to do with this stuff? And why don't we just tell people that they can eat it. And the early advertisements show these people in clean white coats, that they were scientists and they figured out how to create this wonderful product and was going to be more digestible, cleaner and you would be a more modern person and they actually implied that you'd be more prosperous and you'd be prouder of your children if you used the Crisco instead of the lard. The early targets were the south, the frying of foods in the south but also the Jewish community because they said you can use Crisco and or margarine and you don't have to worry about your kosher laws.
CASSIE: Because you’re eating candles!
KARA: I find that story so interesting and maddening. Cassie and I were both shaking her head like oh no, when we read that chapter.
Yeah well we are going to come back and get back into this discussion but we have to take a quick commercial break Sally you'll stay with us right? Yes. I'm on the phone. Wonderful. You're listening to Dishing Up Nutrition brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness, as you have noticed we have the great pleasure of interviewing Sally Fallon Morell about her Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. If you have questions for Sally this morning you can call the studio at 651-641-1071. And we'll be back on the other side of this break.
KARA: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition as you all know there are celebrations and holidays over the next three months that you really need to be mindful of ahead of time so that you can avoid all of the sugary treats that are just waiting to sabotage your weight loss and your health goals. So right around the corner that we have first Halloween candy then of course the Thanksgiving pies. And then there are Hanukkah and Christmas cookies. So just stay on an eating plan and feel good many of our clients find that taking the Nutrition 4 Weight Loss Program gives them the support they need and help some to reaffirm their commitment to their health and weight loss goals. Classes start the week of October 30th. You can sign up by October 21st and you would qualify to save $50 with our Early Bird special. And you can just call 651-699-3438 you can sign up today.
CASSIE: Kara and Sally, we a caller and I want to take her but I also want to say that it is best to call during breaks because then we can get more callers in the queue. We can only have so many callers coming in at once here. So just something to keep in mind if you have a question for Sally it will work best to call during our break times. We have Tina on line one. Tina welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition. You have a question for Sally?
CALLER: Well I've been kind of doing the Keto-genic type good animal fat diet and I dropped my triglycerides from 181 to 71. In three months. But then I watched a documentary and they show they were saying things like animal fats were bad and they cause all these diseases and to be more vegan. And it's kind of psychologically, I know we’re brainwashed, but it freaks us out. How do we know that we're actually doing the right things, you know what I mean?
CASSIE: A great question. Sally, do you want to take that?
SALLY: Well it is. I mean you are surrounded by misinformation on all sides. And how do you know I'm telling the truth and somebody else isn't? And I would suggest first of all you read the book. I do have a chapter. Well let's put it this way. They started out blaming heart disease on animal fats but then it's got to be all diseases were blamed on animal fats and really for no reason that they could give is just you know animal fats are the whipping boy. And I have a chapter where I go through things like kidney disease, high blood pressure, cancer and so forth and how all of these organizations that you know say that they're supporting kidney patients or cancer patients promote the same diet. It's a low animal fat more vegetable oils more plant based. And what was really no science behind it. And just to give you one example. The kidneys require palmitic acid there's a process called palmitoylation that the kidneys used to work and palmitic acid you get from mainly animal fats. It's one of the saturated fats in animal fats and I'm convinced that this great epidemic of kidney disease that we have this is due partially to the fact that we are not using enough saturated animal fats. In fact, they talked about a study a recent study where they found that they could reverse kidney disease by giving saturated fat, this was in animals.
But so this is just it's you know it's like a religion. It's like a dogma. And there really is no science behind this idea that we should avoid saturated fats and I talk about how much how your body needs a lot of saturated fat. And if you don't eat saturated fat it has a backup plan which is to make saturated fats out of carbohydrates. And if you are not getting enough saturated fat in your diet you will crave carbohydrates especially the simple carbohydrates. And I'm sure that Cassie and Kara working on weight loss, you've seen you've seen this?
KARA: All the time, people have incredible cravings for processed carbs and sugars and you know they come into our office and they've been following a low-fat or fat-free diet or maybe a little bit of olive oil here and there. But you know avoiding butter and meat and things like that.
CASSIE: You know and I think something that might help Tina too you know cause you think well where are all these messages coming from? Sally you could speak to the question of who has benefited from the ongoing campaign against these animals.
SALLY: entire food industry benefits from the anti-saturated fat, anti animal fat campaign. Starting with the vegetable oil industry because these oils are very cheap and they sell them to the makers of chips and cookies and so forth and so they can make a lot more profit on their food if they use vegetable oils. Even the dairy industry profits from this, because what they do is they take the fat out of the milk – and I like to point out that butter fat is the fat in nature for growth for all animals. It's in all mammalian milk that can't be bad for you know it's there for a reason. And we're giving skim milk, low-fat milk to our schoolchildren who need this animal fat very, very desperately. And instead they've figured out that they can make more profit putting this fat into ice cream. So in fact you will see somebody is on the low-fat diet all day long. And by 9:00 at night they're absolutely starving for saturated fats and they go to the freezer and they pull out a half a gallon of ice cream and eat the whole thing in one standing up at the freezer.
KARA: Don’t you refer to that as the puritanical diet going to the pornographic diet?
SALLY: Well yes I think people will say on the puritanical foods and then they are so desperate and so hungry that they start eating the pornographic foods. That's got to be something in between and there is and you know it's chicken with crispy skin and sourdough bread with butter and all these wonderful thing. Eggs and bacon, these are the true healthy foods. And the way we used to eat and America was a healthy nation when we ate those kinds of foods.
CASSIE: Right. Tina I hope that's helpful and I really was just having read the book myself I really would encourage you to get a copy because Sally gives you the research. I mean you can't read this book and not walk away understanding why we absolutely need animal fats based on good science.
CALLER: Well what Sally said really rang true I speak because I watched a documentary I stopped with the big Avocado and all my fat for two weeks and my cravings have hit me like a Mack truck. And when I was eating those full fat I was not having cravings. Now that really does hit home.
KARA: Yeah. And you know I mean we our bodies just need fats because they're satiating and they stabilize our blood sugar as well as all the health benefits that Sally has been referring to.
SALLY: And animal fats as everybody knows there. They are the source of cholesterol. That's where we get cholesterol from animal fats and what people don't realize is that we make so many hormones out of cholesterol we make estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, DHEA all that is made of cholesterol, sleep hormones are made of cholesterol, but also the hormones that we use to regulate blood sugar blood pressure to detoxify to deal with stress to heal. These are all made up of cholesterol and we can't make them without vitamin A which we get from animal fats and the industrial fats and oils interfere with the production of these hormones out of cholesterol.
CASSIE: And we're going to come back on the other side a break and continue this conversation. If you're just joining us you're listening to Dishing Up Nutrition. Before we break I want to read an intriguing and a very insightful paragraph from Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. Here's what Sally wrote. High levels of cholesterol in the blood provide protection against mental decline. A 2005 Swedish study analyzed data from 392 men and women in Gothenburg, Sweden over an 18 year period. Researchers found that high blood cholesterol at the ages of 70, 75 and 79 was associated with a reduced risk of dementia between the ages of 79 and 88. American researchers also found that in the elderly the best memory function was observed in those with the highest levels of blood cholesterol. Low cholesterol on the other hand was associated with an increased risk for depression and even death. Very interesting research information I'm sure new information for a lot of our listeners. And if you have questions for us today the number is 651-641-1071. We'll be right back.
KARA: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. I like to share some information about a really important conference that's coming up, it's November 10th through the 13th straight here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's the 18th annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation and it's called Taking Our Health to new Heights. There will be many well-known speakers for you to choose from including Chris Master John I'm a big fan of his. He's an expert on fat soluble vitamins. There's Dr. Tom Cohen a holistic physician and co-author of the Nourishing Traditions book of Baby and Child Care. And then of course our special guest that we have on air today Sally Fallon Morell, author, speaker and founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation.
I mean it's just going to be an amazing conference.
CASSIE: Amazing. I was just looking at the lineup online again last night and I'd love to go all days. I just don't have childcare all days but I'm going to be there a couple of days.
SALLY: And what I like about this conference is there's something for everyone. We have the latest news information on nutrition which is you know more of the science, science but we also have practical classes on cooking food preparation, farming and gardening. And my own seminar which is an introduction to the principles of traditional diets.
KARA: Yes wonderful. I did see that. I'm really looking forward to attending I don't know how many days but as much as possible.
SALLY: It'll be great to see you there.
KARA: Yes we all come up and get your autograph. So you know Cassie were kind of talking a break but about clients that we have and we often have clients that will go to Europe they go to France for example. They really love that they're eating saturated fats, butter, eggs, cheese, cream liver meat and rich patties. So to their surprise and delight they often will lose weight which of course that's a goal for a lot of Americans. But you know aside from weight Sally can you just talk about the rate of coronary heart disease in France how that compares to the United States?
SALLY: This is actually called the French paradox because the rates of heart disease are very low in France even though people eat all of these rich animal foods and they have high levels of cholesterol in the blood. But the rate of heart disease heart attack is low at least it was until recently because the French have kind of succumb to this propaganda also. But when you look at the statistics it's not just France, Austria, Finland, Switzerland. There's about six countries in Europe that have very high levels of saturated fat consumption and low rates of heart disease. So there's many paradoxes here and the same study found that countries with the lowest rates of saturated fat consumption tend to have high rates of heart disease.
KARA: And so that brings us to the United States of course. And you know a lot of times, again going back to our clients, we will go to their doctor for a checkup and they're told that their cholesterol is too high and they should go on a statin to lower their cholesterol. But you know you have Sally referred to an article that was published in the Journals Expert Review In Clinical Pharmacology 2015 and it stated that statins may lower cholesterol numbers but not reduce heart disease.
SALLY: Right. And it talks about all the things that statins do they lower a compound called coenzyme Q10 CoQ10 which is needed for your muscles to work. And they also lower the absorption of K2 and also vitamin A. They don't mention that in this article, which we need to protect our arteries. And so basically they're saying the epidemic of heart failure and atherosclerosis that plagues the modern world may paradoxically be aggravated by the pervasive use of drugs. In other words the thing the statin drugs make this worse and make your tendency to heart disease worse. And other people have tried to figure out if you take a statin drug, let's you take that drug for 10 years, with all of the side effects including muscle weakness a trembling of the hands. Parkinson's likes symptoms. Memory loss. All of these things, how much longer would you live. And the answer is two or three days. Two or three days and that's it. And you know the people get stents or handpicked they're the people who can afford them who have health insurance and so forth and they're being compared to the people who tend to be a little poorer and eating more junk food probably and still you only have this three or four days of extra life.
CASSIE: Oh my goodness. And you know this. I was sharing with Kara in the break room before the show and on that my mom over the past year has really been pushed and pushed to start on a statin and I she's got me on the other side telling her no. But you know she's of that generation that is what the doctor says, is what you do. This would be a great book for everybody out there like my mom that's trying to wrap their head around why is this wrong. And on that note Sally we had somebody call during the break. They didn't want to go on air but wanted to know where they can purchase your book. Do you want to let everybody know?
SALLY: Ok, nourishing are on online booksellers and it's in bookstores as well. Bookstores if they don't have it they can order it for you. That generation and it was the same with my parents and they were on statins and I could not change their minds. They had so much respect for doctors but they don't realize is that the medical profession in the last 20 30 years has been really corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry and especially if a doctor is in a practice, their bonus is predicated on writing a certain number of prescriptions for them and not just their bonus but the bonus for the whole practice. So there's a tremendous pressure for them to put pretty much all of their patients on them whether they need them or not. And I think one really important fact to know and this has been corroborated in numerous studies for women of any age the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live. And for men over the age of 60 the higher your cholesterol the longer you live. So there really is absolutely no reason to go on these drugs.
KARA: The higher the cholesterol the longer the longer you live. I hope everybody heard that.
CASSIE: Such an important message. Hope so too because don't you see that Kara and people think the lower the better.
SALLY: People think the lower the better and you know the average cholesterol United States is about 240. Well they made the cutoff point two hundred if you have cholesterol over 200 you're at risk for heart disease and you should get a stem so that makes millions of healthy people turn into patients right away. What they're finding is that people can be on statins or have very low cholesterol and still have a heart to heart attack and then they say well obviously your cholesterol is not in low enough. So even though your cholesterol is very low they put you on a statin anyway. And people need to know that low cholesterol is a marker for cancer it is a risk factor for cancer. And frankly I mean I don't think this is the choice I'm making but frankly I would rather go with a quick heart attack than a long struggle with cancer.
CASSIE: You know we've talked quite a bit about the saturated fats now and the cholesterol and in great topic all of it is covered pretty extensively in chapters one through four of your book. But I want to jump ahead a little bit in the book Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. Chapter 8 is one of my favorites. It's called Remember the Little Ones; Why Children Need Animal Fats. I would love it if you could. We're going to go to break in a couple of minutes. But if you could even just start to talk about you know you talked about vitamin A earlier in the show and why adults need to but why do we need vitamin A for that growing baby for fetal development.
SALLY: Yes, vitamin A directs the stem cells tells them how to differentiate to become the cells of all the organs and bones and everything in your body and you need the mom need a lot of vitamin A for this process of fetal development to go normally. And that's why traditional cultures built up their nutritional stores eight foods like liver and egg yolks and fish eggs and foods really rich in vitamin A six months before conception and they prepare they built up their nutritional stores so that at the moment of conception you had plenty of vitamin A to direct this process of fetal development. And this is corroborated by lots and lots of studies for example the vitamin A stress of the mother will determine how many kidney cells the baby has. The more vitamin A the more kidney cells the more kidney cells the healthy other kidney will be for life not just when the baby's born but for life.
KARA: I don't think we're hearing that. I mean you know my doctor told me take your folic acid maybe some DHEA. People are not talking about the importance of vitamin A during fetal development.
CASSIE: No and I want to come back to this topic because this is an important topic but we will take our final break here if you're just joining us you're listening to Dishing Up Nutrition. And before we break I want to say to all of our listeners whether you're listening to our live show this morning or whether you're listening to our podcast as you're driving or exercising We just want to give you a big thank you. And for our podcast listeners we want to invite you to write a review on iTunes. We welcome and really appreciate your comments and suggestions remember we are just a small locally owned company but our goal is to make a big difference in the health and well-being of people everywhere. By teaching the power of eating real food. So again thank you for listening and for sharing Dishing Up Nutrition with your family and friends.
KARA: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. Many of us from Nutritional Weight & Wellness are going to be attending the Weston A. Price Foundation's 18th Annual Conference in November. If you want more information about the conference you can just go to wisetraditions.org.
And if you'd like to purchase Sally's newest book Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness, they're going to be available at the conference but also in you know we already mentioned this but their books are available in most bookstores and through online booksellers. You know it's just a remarkable book and I'm planning to bring it to my nutrition classes that I am teaching and I would love to have one in our office for while we're doing individual consulting so that we can have access to quickly look up research if someone has a question. Sally already did all the work for us.
CASSIE: It's great but it's one of those books that you keep you don't borrow because I always go back to a chapter here in there to yourself or look something up.
SALLY: And by the way that conference is a wisetraditions.org. It goes right to our conference page.
KARA: Ok. So before break we were talking about Vitamin A how important that is. Well I mean at all stages in life. But it's something that I don't think pregnant moms or moms to be are told are the importance of vitamin A before pregnancy and during and for breastfeeding.
SALLY: And as the child grows in fact moms are told that vitamin A will cause birth defects.
CASSIE: You're told not to get too much aren't you.
SALLY: Well they're told even told not to eat liver. And you know 50 years ago moms were specifically told to eat liver when they were pregnant. And this is really a shame because the there's only one study that indicates there might be a problem with birth defects but it contradicts all the other studies that show that vitamin A protects against birth defects. And I actually just came across a study a couple of days ago which showed that if you get your vitamin A from food like liver or egg yolks butter and so forth that there's even less of a problem with the vitamin A from food. It needs to be supported by vitamin D and K they all need to be together in the diet. And this is why we don't recommend just taking isolated vitamins. You know even 15, 20 years ago the prenatal vitamins contained vitamin A. And today it does not. They've taken it out. So it's really a shame because we're seeing the birth rate of birth defects go up. We're seeing premature birth go up the rate of miscarriage go up and the number of heart defects is rising for example.
And a lot of this has to do with the really poor advice that pregnant women or women who want to get pregnant are getting from the medical profession.
KARA: And I was even given that advice you know don't take too much vitamin A. And so, but could you please clarify too there's different forms of vitamin A. I think there's a big misconception that people get enough money from plant foods from eating carrots and spinach.
SALLY: Right. So what's in the plant food or the carotenes. And these are converted to vitamin A in these small intestine by some people but about 50% of all women actually cannot do this at all. And the process of converting the carotene to Vitamin A is interfered with by a lot of conditions such as thyroid disease liver disease. If you were exposed to pesticides or chemicals that will interfere with this conversion and I like to think of the animals like the cow eating green grass all day long the cow is a step up transformer for us transforms the carotenes and green grass into vitamin A. And we need to honor what the cow is doing for us and get the true vitamin A from the butter and the cream and from the liver.
KARA: And egg yolks also you said?
SALLY: Egg yolks are a wonderful source especially if these chickens are outside.
CASSIE: So animals are our multi-vitamins.
SALLY: Animals are our multi-vitamins.
CASSIE: That's the picture I'm getting say we have a caller on line 1. I'd like to take I'm sure she has a question for you Sally, Lou Ann, do you have a question?
CALLER: Thank you for taking my questions. You're welcome. So I've been following Nutritional Weight & Wellness for a long time. Cassie, I saw you a couple times. But I recently went to a lecture on the Blue Zones looking for places around the world where people live there. They have great longevity they have tremendous mental sharpness and really vibrant physical health and they are largely eating a plant based diet. I mean there's other factors. You know they have a great family and community life. They have a purpose. They move naturally rather than you know like going to a gym. So they have a lot going for them but their diets are largely plant based. They like to eat meat three times a year fish and three times a week. It's wonder if you've heard of this?
CASSIE: Not the first time you've been asked this one Sally, but a great question.
SALLY: I just wrote a series of blogs at my blog Nourishing Traditions about the Blue Zones and the idea that these long lived people are eating more plant foods is totally wrong. I have to say that it's a lie. The studies have shown that the people who live longer are eating more animal protein, more animal fat. And actually when you read the book The Blue Zones he describes how they're cooking in lard and eating beef. And his conclusions are completely different from his actual descriptions of about how people eat. This is one of these examples of how something has been taken and twisted and misrepresented so that people think they should be eating a plant based diet. So I urge you to go on my blog. Nourishing Traditions and read my blogs about the Blue Zones in every single one of these Blue Zones has had a study done about it. And these studies show that the ones eating more animal foods are living longer.
CASSIE: Thank you Lou Ann, that really was a great question because you know there are other listeners out there wondering the same thing.
SALLY: And it's the same with the China Study. People say oh what about the China Study. I have probably one of the few people in the world who's actually looked at the China Study. I went to the library and got the publication of the China Study which is this really big book. It's very hard to copy but I copy the data that they got. And at the time Colin Campbell was saying oh we found that the people who are eating animals more plant food had less disease. That is not what the data showed. The data did not show any difference in disease from people eating more or less animal foods. And actually it was a very bad study. It was the poorly designed there were too many variables in the study to come to any conclusions. But certainly the data did not show that people eating more plant foods were healthier or living longer or anything. But again the China Study is used to like the Blue Zones it's being falsely used to promote a plant based diet.
KARA: And you address this in your Nourishing Fats book as well in a few different places.
SALLY: And believe me I'm not against plants. If people saw how we ate in our house we have two or three vegetables with every meal. But those vegetables are swimming in butter. To me the whole purpose of vegetables is to put butter on them.
CASSIE: Well and Sally you and I believe you mentioned this in the book. You absorb those vitamins from those vegetables if you put butter on that. Right?
SALLY: Much better. Exactly. And we eat grains. We eat potatoes, we eat carbs. We have a well-rounded diet. I'm not saying that you should go in the other extreme and just eat meat. We need all of these foods. But the meat and the fats are a very important part of our diet.
CASSIE: Absolutely. You know Sally our show is reaching its close. I want to take a minute to let you know how grateful we are that you accepted our invitation to join us today. Thank you.
SALLY: And thank you for telling people about the conference. We'd love to see your listeners at our upcoming conference.
CASSIE: Well we'll be there and I'm sure we'll have many listeners too and I hope everyone listening goes out and gets a copy of your fascinating new book Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. As Sally said it's in bookstores it's online.
Thank you everyone for listening. Remember that eating real food is life-changing. And I hope everyone has a healthy day.
