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Saturated Fats: Your Best Friend, Painted your Worst Enemy!

Sep 25, 2017

Is saturated fat good for you? Yes, it is. Then why does it attract so much negative attention? Let’s try and understand this through an analogy of a daytime TV soap.

It’s a grand story that could put the most over-the-top Mexican and Hollywood scriptwriters to shame. The Writer-Director-Producer of the soap is the processed food lobby. These are people who manufacture sugar, vegetable oils and the millions of processed food products created from a combination of these.

Episode 1 opens around 50 years ago, in the U.S. with doctors looking worried about the sudden, exponential increase in rates of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease. “Coincidentally”, it was around the same time that the U.S. was being flooded with new, cheap products created from refined sugar and refined vegetable oils.

Cut to scene two, where the processed food industry gathers in a board room. They know their products are responsible for chronic diseases. They figure that unless the doctors are given a scapegoat to pin the blame for the chronic disease, they will be forced to accept guilt and their profits will soon vanish.

Meanwhile, the heroine of our soap, saturated fat, is quietly going about her work of keeping people healthy. This is something she has done for centuries, like a dutiful daughter or daughter in law in the soap drama. One day, her life is completely turned upside down, when the police come and arrest her.

Overnight, saturated fats, which includes full cream milk, hand churned butter, ghee, lard, cheese and fats in animal meat are all considered evil.

What follows over the next several seasons of the daytime soap is what happens to the innocent hero or heroine in all such dramas. In spite of being good, saturated fat (our heroine) is systematically accused of things she are not guilty of. False proof is produced in courts and she is thrown in jail.

Meanwhile, her family, which is all of us, happily eat processed breakfast cereal and donuts, thinking it is healthy and wonderful. We use processed vegetable oils to cook food, thinking we were keeping our arteries clean. We minimize or give up butter, ghee, full cream milk, thinking those were the things that made us fat. As an entire world population, we fall for the deception of the villains, the processed food lobby and lose faith in our heroine.

Luckily, today, 2017, we are at that crucial turning point in the soap drama where the lies of the villains are slowly getting exposed.

Just last year, the U.S. government has had to openly acknowledge that dietary saturated fats are not the villain they were thought to be. More and more M.D.s are speaking out in defense of real food, in defense of butter and ghee and fat. Lawsuits are being filed against the processed food manufacturers for misleading people on purpose and causing such havoc on global health.

Here’s how I see the soap ending. Everyone will acknowledge that saturated fat is good for you. 

One day, not in the distant future, we will all realize that saturated fat, our dutiful daughter, has always been good and right. Whole cream milk, butter, ghee, cheese, meats with saturated fat in them, are all very good for human health. Not only do they help us grow and repair our bodies, they keep us physically fit and young and mentally happy too. They provide the fat-soluble vitamins K, E, D and A and good cholesterol, needed for hundreds of bodily functions.

The real problem is with so-called low-fat processed vegetable oils, that are cheaper to make than butter and that spoil easily. When they combine with sugar products to produce the stuff we love on supermarket shelves, from chips to bread to candy to pasta to a million other things, that’s poison, right there.

So in the final act of the soap drama, the processed food villain will be thrown in jail, the saturated fats good daughter will be invited back into the home to take her place of pride. And we will all live happily ever after. I would suggest you get a head start – by bringing back butter and ghee and whole cream milk to your family’s dining table. Wish you all vibrant health and well being!

Mahesh Jayaraman
Mahesh is a hormone health counsellor & holistic health expert. He has a Mastery Certification in Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis from the US, is certified in Functional Nutrition from Washington State University and uses a wide array of healing modalities to guide his clients to vibrant health and well-being.

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