Book review: know your fats
This book, published in 2000 (!!!) is written by one of the world’s leading lipid biochemists. She wrote for a ‘fat phobic’ world and if she was still alive today I’m sure she’d have a lot to say about our Dark Calories https://www.fitbynature.org/blog/book-review-dark-calories that contribute to almost 80% of our calorie intake.
She wrote about coconut oil far before it's time -- in fact, she was in the "pro-coconut-oil-camp" while coconut oil was still demonized for saturated fat in the 80s.
She recognized the dangers of hydrogenated, partially-hydrogenated oils and trans fats far before anyone else was talking about them.
Mary Enig made her mark in the nutrition world in 1978 when she and her colleagues at the University of Maryland published a paper in Federation Proceedings that directly challenged government assertions that higher cancer rates were associated with animal fat consumption. She concluded that the data actually indicated that vegetable oils and their trans fatty acids—not saturated fats—were the culprits for the rising incidence of both cancer and heart disease.
Enig shatters popular myths about saturated fats, methodically demonstrating the faulty data and reasoning behind the ideas that saturates either cause or contribute to heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, mental illness, obesity and cerebrovascular disease, both from 1978 and in this year 2000 book. For example, after trashing the “data” that supposedly prove that beef and beef fat caused colon cancer, Enig flatly concludes: “And now, more than three (3) decades after the initial fraudulent report, the anti-animal fat hypothesis continues to lead the nutrition agenda. It was a false issue then, and it remains a false issue today.” Today, another two decades later, those seed oils have wreaked their havoc indeed!
Most interesting is Enig’s insider take on the nutritional research world and the forces that work behind the scenes to manipulate the facts. Never one to shy away from controversy, Enig blasts such organizations as the American Dietetics Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the American Heart Association, and the food industry in general.
While the book is certainly no page turner, Enig’s dry, data driven results speak 1/2 a century in advance of our current nutrition woes and subsequent health issues. Co-founder of the Weston A Price foundation, her work continues on after her death to promote what food really is in navigating the hectic world we’ve invented for ourselves.
