The Special Nutritional Values of Natural Fats

Quote from Radio Address, National Broadcasting Co., January 18, 1941; Dr. Thomas Parran, Surgeon General of U.S. Public Health Service: “We have learned of the virtues of milk and of green vegetables; of the fish liver oils, so rich in vitamins A and D; of the vitamin C in citrus fruits. In spite of this, every survey, by whatever method and wherever conducted, shows that malnutrition of many types is widespread and serious among the American people. We eat over-refined foods, with most of the natural values processed out of them. Because of this, many well-to-do American who can eat what they like are so badly fed as to be physically inferior and mentally dull. The nutrition of the very poor is appalling. By their lack of morale you shall know all of them.”

 

Few people realize how extensively synthetic fats have supplanted the natural in our food pattern.

I should start by defining a synthetic fat. It is one which has been made from a cheap vegetable oil like cottonseed or coconut, by the process of hydrogenation. This means the cooking at high temperature and high pressure of the oil in the presence of a catalyst and elemental hydrogen so that the original oil is destroyed and a new compound takes its place. All vitamins and nutritional mineral factors are also destroyed in the process, and the resulting dark and smelly grease is bleached and deodorized to a pure white colorless and tasteless synthetic fat that can then be processed to imitate butter, lard or other shortening or frying fat.

The physical properties of the new product are quite desirable. It is resistant to high temperatures, does not absorb onion or other odors. It has everything but nutritional value.

When we consider nutritional value, let us carefully consider the facts. When we eat, what is the hardest thing to find–calories or the rare essential vitamin and mineral factors of foods? As a matter of fact, most of us are suffering severe reactions from the excess of calories and the deficiency of vitamins and minerals in the foods we eat.

Calories, without the vitamins and minerals, are the most undesirable thing that can be suggested in any modern diet, where we are called upon less and less for physical effort, and find it more and more difficult to get the essential vitamins and minerals.

Can you imagine the fate of the unsuspecting person who eats a breakfast of hot cakes and glucose, with oleo instead of butter? He is eating a totally synthetic and refined complex with no nutritional values outside of calories that he would be far better off without. Even the vitamin A put into the oleo today is synthetic, and a farce as a food vitamin.

No synthetic vitamin to my knowledge has ever been demonstrated to be capable of contributing any nutritional values to any diet for man or animal. Instead, synthetic additions hasten the death of the test animal, and show negative instead of positive effects. They are added purely as an advertising stunt to catch the unwary, cannot be considered nutrition according to any tests we can refer to.¹

(Their effects as drugs are another story–we here are discussing nutrition.)

In order to be able to mislabel a synthetic food as a food, a very high hurdle must first be overcome. Any natural food is a complex of vast interlocking and cooperating factors, whether it is a natural carbohydrate like starch, honey, or maple sugar. As an example, maple syrup is a saturated solution of calcium in an organic form. In the syrup cooking kettles, this calcium salt separates as “maple sand.” That is why it protects teeth instead of destroying them, like refined sugars.

All natural vitamins are complexes; natural vitamin A contains a special fat soluble synergist that physiologically lowers high blood pressure, just as natural cod liver oil contains a synergist of vitamin D that promotes the assimilation of calcium by the body cells, whereas the pure vitamin D will rob the cells of calcium. New-born babies fed the pure or synthetic D fail to get the vitamin effect, and may be worse off than if fed no vitamin D at all.²

Those who fortify milk with the phony vitamin D have a grave responsibility. I know of one pediatrician who, after killing a number of babies with overdoses of synthetic vitamin D, committed suicide when confronted with the evidence that showed him the gullible victim of irresponsible counterfeit vitamin promoters.

Baby foods today, because of irresponsible efforts to quote lower and lower prices to ignorant purchasers, are in the main composed of skim milk, condensed and loaded with oleo. The butter fat has been removed to sell to the Government to support the farm price of dairy products, and the butter so removed is, in the main, allowed to go rancid and finally be sold for soap grease.

Meanwhile, the baby is robbed of some very important food factors that are very hard to duplicate. They can be only found where the cow got them–from green grass or green leaf vegetation. The fat soluble factors of these sources contains:

1. Vitamin A complex
2. Vitamin E complex. And its full brother and associate,
3. Vitamin F complex
4. Vitamin K complex
5. The antiarthritic factor (antistiffness factor) also known as the Wulzen Factor
6. The Phospholipid Complex
7. The sex hormones and their precursors
8. Various enzymes including phosphatase so essential to the assimilation of cereal minerals, cereal phosphates, and cereal inositol.

 

Now, to review in a few words the reactions we find from the deficiency of each of these factors.

1. Hypertension, photophobia, poor development of eyes in offspring, liver disease, kidney disease, skin disease
2. Heart disease is the big penalty of our failure to get this complex. One fraction of the E complex will act identically as nitroglycerine in relieving angina pectoris. (E2)

Another commonly relieves stomach ulcers (The cabbage juice factor, no doubt), otherwise known as E3. Suspected to be one of the sex hormone precursors.

There seems no possible question but what our high incidence of heart disease is a result of the great use of vitamin E deficient foods. Test animals put on a food schedule lacking this one vitamin complex soon die a sudden death from heart failure–in one test 13 out of 28 within 36 months.³

Only fresh ground whole grain products and fresh high quality butter are common sources of this life-saving vitamin E complex. Flour loses its vitamin E within a few days after milling, by oxidation. It cannot exist in rancid oils. No packaged cereal contains this vitamin, to our knowledge.

It is easy to see why the leading cause of death in this country is heart disease. The leading foods are totally devoid of this essential food factor; it has been carefully removed or destroyed by oxidizing agents used to bleach and preserve foods otherwise perishable and with natural colors that fully protect the buyer by indicating the quality and grade. No one would buy an unbleached synthetic fat, or unbleached flour from musty grain, both have the dirty appearance of total unfitness for food. By bleaching, both can be sold as “fine quality” and of course the buyer must never know what is missing. Maybe this is the influence cited by Dr. Hickman in his comment (p. 111 of Ref. 3):

“The protagonists of vitamin E can console themselves that in spite of a bad press and rather vehement medical incredulity, as well as lack of notice or acceptance by research councils and nutrition departments, vitamin E has become accepted by the public as a valuable supplement to diet.”

(Our Federal Food & Drug Administration insists that there is no need for vitamin E complex in human nutrition. This, we believe, is evidence of the Soviet type of totalitarian steering of scientific fact–for political purposes the scientific world must ignore facts and misrepresent to the people about a deficiency that appears responsible for 700,000 deaths per year.)

Dr. Hickman further tells us (p. 111) in later years of life the human requirement may rise to 50 times the usual amount needed to maintain health. No wonder the usual cause of death in this country is vitamin E deficiency–Heart Disease–as noted in our book, American Beri-Beri. (Oriental beri-beri differs in that death occurs from B complex deficiency; the victim in this country gets more of the B complex from other sources, so he lives long enough to die from the E deficiency part of the same syndrome–to say nothing about the unrecognized forms of beri-beri and pellagra such as nervousness, neuritis, mental despondency, dermatitis, burning and painful spots on the skin, and gastrointestinal complications that arise from a lack of the other vitamins lost in cereal processing.)

3. The vitamin F complex. This is a strange member of the vitamin family. It seems that many people are mortally afraid of this complex.

Often we see such peculiar statements as “no such vitamin exists.” We refer those who want proof of its existence to the Annual Review of Biochemistry for 1949. Here a section tells us a little about this factor first discovered by Burr as an associate of vitamin E in wheat germ oil, 20 years ago.

This review also gives us this important suggestion: that the deficiency of vitamin F may be the nutritional cause of cancer. We do know that when a group of test animals were put on a low vitamin diet of refined foods, 90% became cancerous when injected with cancer virus, but none of a control group became cancerous when given the same shots, but fed on good natural high-vitamin food.⁴

This supports fully the original findings of Dr. Davidson of Winnipeg who demonstrated that poor food created a 100% susceptibility to cancer and good food, after a few generations, restored immunity to cancer.

These items deserve headline publicity, but our cancer research foundations are far more concerned with raising money than they are in actually proving that some food deficiency is responsible for the disease.

Test animals put on a food schedule lacking in vitamin F soon develop a dermatitis, lose most of their hair, and die of kidney infection.

One fraction of the F complex, separated from liver fat, has the interesting effect of protecting the cellular or chromosome ”blueprints.”

Where a depleted liver fails to supply it, the victim loses his appetite for just one reason–his tissues cannot make use of any constructive nutrition, the blood stream remains loaded up and he cannot eat if he wants to. Children in this predicament stand still, and are a real problem. Adults tend to develop an emaciated state, often to the point of a state of muscular dystrophy, anemia, or other atrophic tendency. The use of vitamin F2 acts with prompt effect on the appetite, in a matter of almost minutes, where this deficiency exists.

In the male, vitamin F deficiency seems definitely to aggravate if not cause prostate enlargement; in the female it aggravates the reactions of menopause. As this vitamin promotes the availability of calcium to the cells, its deficiency is characterized by allergic aggravation, nervous reactions, and bone atrophy and degeneration.

Since the muscle cell must have calcium too, in a deficiency there is a tendency for stiffness after exercise, and heart reactions obvious in the recorded heart sound by a reduction or total absence of the second sound when observed over the apex. Administration of the vitamin restores this sound in five minutes in such cases.

4. Vitamin K. Babies above all need this vitamin. Without it, they have a hard time surviving the first few weeks of life. They become subject to hemorrhagic tendencies because of prothrombin lack, the liver becoming unable to supply it without this vitamin.
5. The Wulzen Factor. Just how many arthritics would be relieved if this vitamin were more available is hard to say.

Other causes aggravate arthritis, like alkalosis and autointoxication. Cooked food in general predisposes to arthritis, and every case differs by reason of the personal food-pattern idiosyncrasies of each victim.

We do know that the best source of the Wulzen Factor is good blackstrap or Louisiana Molasses, otherwise hard to find in common foods.

6. The Phospholipid Complex. This includes Lecithin, often found a valuable aid in reducing diets, and often prescribed as a cholesterol eliminator.

No doubt we would never have heard of cholesterol as a menace to health had we not involved ourselves in the national use of millions of pounds of synthetic fats, totally devoid of any trace of natural lecithin, the specific antidote for cholesterol. Butter, strangely, has been put on the list of bad foods for the hypercholesterol patient by ill informed doctors who failed to realize that the minute content of cholesterol in butter is far outweighed by its lecithin content.

Naturally, the oleo promoters are quick to take advantage of such a mistake. I would say, the best way to get loaded with excess cholesterol is to avoid butter. We make vast amounts of cholesterol in the body.

It is the phospholipids in natural fats that enable us to eliminate it. It is the phospholipids in natural fats that enable us to emulsify and consume our own fat deposits when we go on a low calorie diet. A reducing diet should include high-lecithin fats. Without enough lecithin, we are trying to withdraw deposits in the bank without a check-book.

7. The sex hormones and their precursors.

Natural fats contain estrogenic and androgenic factors in many cases, and it is a matter of scientific test on human subjects to find that oleo feeding to children of adolescent ages has a very definite desexing effect. The victims became like castrated farm animals, bigger and fatter than normal, the girls showing the most pronounced reaction.⁵

The Bell Telephone Laboratories found a 3/4 inch recession in 20 years of the average lower jaw, and all know we are getting taller year by year. More evidence of nutritional castration. Eunuchs often grow to 7 ft. This situation needs careful and systematic looking into.

8. Enzymes. One authority has said that “Vitamins and enzymes are just the opposite sides of the same coin.”

We concur in that definition. Enzymes are functional mechanisms, not Chemicals. Just as a Watch is a Functioning Mechanism, but only a curious hunk of metal to a savage. To the untutored chemist, a vitamin too is a chemical, subject to synthesis.

But to those who see further, all vitamins are mechanisms, too, and can no more be handled on a basis of weight and measure than a watch. Its effect is what we pay for–what we want. Where cardiographs or other instruments can measure a vitamin, only the natural complex has any nutritional effect.

If you are looking for some effect, that is another matter. Logically, we all know that there can be no possible deficiency of one element of any vitamin complex by reason of food refining. The whole complex is gone!

Take pellagra and beri-beri. They cannot be cured by any synthetic vitamin.

Only good foods will do that job.

An automobile is organic iron. Organized according to the plans of the designer. Vitamins and enzymes are organic chemicals in the same sense. Rough treatment, cooking, oxidation, ruin their effectiveness. We never would have been aware of their existence had we not tried to live without them. It is an intelligence test–with premature death the penalty for our failure to understand.

 

References Cited:

1. Science, March 14, 1941. Agnes Fay Morgan. Reprint free from Lee Foundation, Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin.
2. “Influence of Diet on the Occurrence of Hyperphosphatemia and Hypocalcemia in the Newborn Infant.” Gittleman & Pincus, Pediatrics, Vol. 8 No. 6, December, 1951.
3. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 52, Art. 3, p. 256-9.
4. Reprint #18, Lee Foundation, Milwaukee 3, Wis. Copy on request.
5. Some Interrelations Between Vitamins & Hormones, May, 1950. R. Lee. Reprint free from Lee Foundation, Milwaukee 3, Wis.