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No Cholesterol Claims Stir Up FDA (draft)
Typed manuscript prepared for Ojai Valley News, undated.
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Dear Dr. Meinig: I was under the impression that corn oil had no cholesterol and was good for us and its use would reduce the chance of heart attacks. Now I see by the papers that the FDA is saying these food oil products are unhealthy. How about a little clarification? I’m confused. – M. T.
Dear M. T.: The FDA has been so supportive of the food and drug industry that I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see them take on Proctor & Gamble, CPC International and Great Foods of America for their deceptive product labels.
Mazola corn oil and Crisco corn oil were highly criticized for picturing a heart, and right across it boldly stating on the label “no cholesterol.” The fact is, these products never contained any cholesterol in the first place. Johnny Carson made a big point in ridiculing these ads, saying his tie didn’t contain any cholesterol, nor did his pencil.
The charge is serious. Here are products that are 100 per cent fat and certainly of questionable health-giving attributes. Actually, it is the excess use of such highly processed fats, along with sugar and refined carbohydrates, that cause the liver and intestines to turn the acetate radicals that are contained in these foods into excessive amounts of cholesterol.
There have been 22 scientific studies made all over the world that have attempted to trace the dietary variables that influence or are related to the cause of heart disease. In not a single one of these 22 studies did the scientist investigators find the cholesterol contained in natural foods, such as eggs, liver, milk and cheese, was involved in that increased risk to the problems that cause our excessive heart attack rate.
For the public to jump to the conclusion that high amounts of blood cholesterol must come from foods that contain cholesterol is understandable, but the fact that so many professional scientists have also swallowed that line is unfathomable.
It has been known for a long time that the amount of cholesterol in our blood that derives from food is only about 15% of the total. Also well known has been the fact that one of the liver’s important functions is to make cholesterol. This unconscionable drive to make cholesterol appear an unnecessary evil is despicable. Cholesterol is a very essential body constituent, having the responsibility of helping to make sex and other hormones, it is necessary for the conversion of sunlight on the skin to vitamin D and has numbers of other vital functions.
Why has it been so difficult to see that when it becomes abnormally elevated that the cause had to be related to other types of dietary indiscretions?
The evidence since World War II has been quite clear and easy to see. Advocates of the theory pleaded with us to give up dairy products and switch to vegetable oils. This the public has done in unprecedented numbers but instead of the heart attack rate falling, it has kept increasing by leaps and bounds.
If failure to make such simple observations by scientists weren’t bad enough, at least four of the low cholesterol, highly unsaturated diets studies have shown not only a failure to lower the heart disease rate but they noted that people who followed them had an increased death rate from other causes.