The Oiling of America - part 2
by Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon
(Reprinted by permission from The Weston A. Price Foundation)
Part 1
Enig speaks out
When Mary Enig, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, read
the McGovern committee report, she was puzzled. Enig was familiar with
Kummerow’s research and she knew that the consumption of animal fats in
America was not on the increase—quite the contrary, use of animal fats
had been declining steadily since the turn of the century. A report in
the Journal of American Oil Chemists—which the McGovern Committee
did not use—showed that animal fat consumption had declined from 104 grams
per person per day in 1909 to 97 grams per day in 1972, while vegetable
fat intake had increased from a mere 21 grams to almost 60.14
Total per capita fat consumption had increased over the period,
but this increase was mostly due to an increase in unsaturated fats from
vegetable oils—with 50 percent of the increase coming from liquid vegetable
oils and about 41 percent from margarines made from vegetable oils. She
noted a number of studies that directly contradicted the McGovern Committee’s
conclusions that there is . . . a strong correlation between dietary
fat intake and the incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer, two of
the most common cancers in America. Greece, for example, had less than
one-fourth the rate of breast cancer compared to Israel but the same dietary
fat intake. Spain had only one-third the breast cancer mortality of France
and Italy but the total dietary fat intake was slightly greater. Puerto
Rico, with a high animal fat intake, had a very low rate of breast and
colon cancer. The Netherlands and Finland both used approximately 100
grams of animal fat per capita per day but breast and colon cancer rates
were almost twice in the Netherlands what they are in Finland. The Netherlands
consumed 53 grams of vegetable fat per person compared to 13 in Finland.
A study from Cali, Columbia found a fourfold excess risk for colon cancer
in the higher economic classes, which used less animal fat than the lower
economic classes. A study on Seventh-Day Adventist physicians, who avoid
meat, especially red meat, found they had a significantly higher rate
of colon cancer than non-Seventh Day Adventist physicians. Enig analyzed
the USDA data that the McGovern Committee had used and concluded that
it showed a strong positive correlation with total fat and vegetable
fat and an essentially strong negative correlation or no correlation
with animal fat to total cancer deaths, breast and colon cancer mortality
and breast and colon cancer incidence—in other words, use of vegetable
oils seemed to predispose to cancer and animal fats seemed to protect
against cancer. She noted that the analysts for the committee had manipulated
the data in inappropriate ways in order to obtain mendacious results.
Enig submitted her findings to the Journal of the Federation of American
Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), in May, 1978, and her article
was published in the FASEB’s Federation Proceedings15
in July of the same year—an unusually quick turnaround. The assistant
editor, responsible for accepting the article, died of a heart attack
shortly thereafter. Enig’s paper noted that the correlations pointed a
finger at the trans fatty acids and called for further investigation.
Only two years earlier, the Life Sciences Research office, which is the
arm of FASEB that does scientific investigations, had published the whitewash
that had ushered partially hydrogenated soybean oil onto the GRAS list
and removed any lingering constraints against the number one ingredient
in factory-produced food.
The food giants fight back
Enig’s paper sent alarm bells through the industry. In early 1979, she
received a visit from S. F. Reipma of the National Association of Margarine
Manufacturers. Reipma was visibly annoyed. He
explained that both his association and the Institute for Shortening
and Edible Oils (ISEO) kept careful watch to prevent articles like Enig’s
from appearing in the literature. Enig’s paper should never have been
published, he said. He thought that ISEO was watching out.
We left the barn door open, he said, and the horse got out.
Reipma also challenged Enig’s use of the USDA data, claiming that it
was in error. He knew it was in error, he said, because we give it to
them.
A few weeks later, Reipma paid a second visit, this time in the company
of Thomas Applewhite, an advisor to the ISEO and representative of Kraft
Foods, Ronald Simpson with Central Soya and an unnamed representative
from Lever Brothers. They carried with them—in fact, waved them in the
air in indignation—a two-inch stack of newspaper articles, including one
that appeared in the National Enquirer, reporting on Enig’s Federation
Proceedings article. Applewhite’s face flushed red with anger when
Enig repeated Reipma’s statement that they had left the barn door open
and a horse got out, and his admission that Department of Agriculture
food data had been sabotaged by the margarine lobby.
The other thing Reipma told Enig during his unguarded visit was that
he had called in on the FASEB offices in an attempt to coerce them into
publishing letters to refute her paper, without allowing Enig to submit
any counter refutation as was normally customary in scientific journals.
He told Enig that he was thrown out of the office—an admission later
confirmed by one of the FASEB editors. Nevertheless, a series of letters
did follow the July 1978 article.16
On behalf of the ISEO, Applewhite and Walter Meyer of Procter and Gamble
criticized Enig’s use of the data; Applewhite accused Enig of extrapolating
from two data points, when in fact she had used seven. In the same issue,
John Bailar, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the National Cancer
Institute, pointed out that the correlations between vegetable oil
consumption and cancer were not the same as evidence of causation and
warned against changing current dietary components in the hopes of preventing
cancer in the future—which is of course exactly what the McGovern Committee
did.
In reply, Enig and her colleagues noted that although the NCI had provided
them with faulty cancer data, this had no bearing on the statistics relating
to trans consumption, and did not affect the gist of their argument—that
the correlation between vegetable fat consumption, especially trans
fat consumption, was sufficient to warrant a more thorough investigation.
The problem was that very little investigation was being done.
University of Maryland researchers recognized the need for more research
in two areas. One concerned the effects of trans fats on cellular
processes once they are built into the cell membrane. Studies with rats,
including one conducted by Fred Mattson in 1960, indicated that the trans
fatty acids were built into the cell membrane in proportion to their presence
in the diet, and that the turnover of trans in the cells was similar
to that of other fatty acids. These studies, according to J. Edward Hunter
of the ISEO, were proof that trans fatty acids do not pose any
hazard to man in a normal diet. Enig and her associates were not so sure.
Kummerow’s research indicated that the trans fats contributed to
heart disease, and Kritchevsky—whose early experiments with vegetarian
rabbits were now seen to be totally irrelevant to the human model—had
found that trans fatty acids raise cholesterol in humans.17
Enig’s own research, published in her 1984 doctoral dissertation, indicated
that trans fats interfered with enzyme systems that neutralized
carcinogens and increased enzymes that potentiated carcinogens.18
How much trans fat is "normal"?
The other area needing further investigation concerned just how much
trans fat there was in a normal diet of the typical American.
What had hampered any thorough research into the correlation of trans
fatty acid consumption and disease was the fact that these altered fats
were not considered as a separate category in any of the data bases then
available to researchers. A 1970 FDA internal memo stated that a market
basket survey was needed to determine trans levels in commonly
used foods. The memo remained buried in the FDA files. The massive Health
and Human Services NHANES II (National Health and Nutrition Examination
Survey) survey, conducted during the years 1976 to 1980, noted the increasing
US consumption of margarine, french fried potatoes, cookies and snack
chips—all made with vegetable shortenings—without listing the proportion
of trans.
Enig first looked at the NHANES II data base in 1987 and when she did,
she had a sinking feeling. Not only were trans fats conspicuously
absent from the fatty acid analyses, data on other lipids made no sense
at all. Even foods containing no trans fats were listed with faulty
fatty acid profiles. For example, safflower oil was listed as containing
14% linoleic acid (a double bond fatty acid of the omega-6 family) when
in fact it contained 80%; a sample of butter crackers was listed as containing
34% saturated fat when in fact it contained 78%. In general, the NHANES
II data base tended to minimize the amount of saturated fats in common
foods.
Over the years, Joseph Sampagna and Mark Keeney, both highly qualified
lipid biochemists at the University of Maryland, applied to the National
Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department
of Agriculture, the National Dairy Council and the National Livestock
and Meat Board for funds to look into the trans content of common
American foods. Only the National Livestock and Meat Board came through
with a small grant for equipment; the others turned them down. The pink
slip from National Institutes of Health criticized items that weren’t
even relevant to the proposal. The turndown by the National Dairy Council
was not a surprise. Enig had earlier learned that Phil Lofgren, then head
of research at the Dairy Council, had philosophical ties to the lipid
hypothesis. Enig tried to alert Senator Mettzanbaum from Ohio, who was
involved in the dietary recommendations debate, but got nowhere.
A USDA official confided to the Maryland research group that they would
never get money as long as they pursued the trans work. Nevertheless
they did pursue it. Sampagna, Keeney and a few graduate students, funded
jointly by the USDA and the university, spend thousands of hours in the
laboratory analyzing the trans fat content of hundreds of commercially
available foods. Enig worked as a graduate student, at times with a small
stipend, at times without pay, to help direct the process of tedious analysis.
The long arm of the food industry did its best to put a stop to the group’s
work by pressuring the USDA to pull its financial support of the graduates
students doing the lipid analyses, which the University of Maryland received
due to its status as a land grant college.
In December of 1982, Food Processing carried a brief preview
of the University of Maryland research19
and five months later the same journal printed a blistering letter from
Edward Hunter on behalf of the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils.20
The University of Maryland studies on trans fat content in common
foods had obviously struck a nerve. Hunter stated that the Bailar, Applewhite
and Meyer letters that had appeared in Federation Proceedings five
years earlier, severely criticized and discredited the conclusions reached
by Enig and her colleagues. Hunter was concerned that Enig’s group would
exaggerate the amount of trans found in common foods. He cited ISEO data
indicating that most margarines and shortenings contain no more than 35%
and 25% trans respectively, and that most contain considerably
less.
What Enig and her colleagues actually found was that many margarines
indeed contained about 31% trans fat—later surveys by others revealed
that Parkay margarine contained up to 45% trans—while many shortenings
found ubiquitously in cookies, chips and baked goods contained more than
35%. She also discovered that many baked goods and processed foods contained
considerably more fat from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils than
was listed on the label. The finding of higher levels of fat in products
made with partially hydrogenated oils was confirmed by Canadian government
researchers many years later, in 1993.21
Final results of Enig’s ground-breaking compilation were published in
the October 1983 edition of the Journal of the American Oil Chemists
Society.22 Her analyses of
more than 220 food items, coupled with food disappearance data, allowed
University of Maryland researchers to confirm earlier estimates that the
average American consumed at least 12 grams of trans fat per day,
directly contradicting ISEO assertions that most Americans consumed no
more that six to eight grams of trans fat per day. Those who consciously
avoided animal fats typically consumed far more than 12 grams of trans
fat per day.
Cat and mouse games in the journals
The ensuing debate between Enig and her colleagues at the University
of Maryland, and Hunter and Applewhite of the ISEO, took the form of a
cat and mouse game running through several scientific journals. Food
Processing declined to publish Enig’s reply to Hunter’s attack. Science
Magazine published another critical letter by Hunter in 1984,23
in which he misquoted Enig, but refused to print her rebuttal. Hunter
continued to object to assertions that average consumption of trans
fat in partially hydrogenated margarines and shortenings could exceed
six to eight grams per day, a concern that Enig found puzzling when coupled
with the official ISEO position that trans fatty acids were innocuous
and posed no threat to public health.
The ISEO did not want the American public to hear about the debate on
hydrogenated vegetable oils—for Enig this translated into the sound of
doors closing. A poster presentation she organized for a campus health
fair caught the eye of the dietetics department chairman who suggested
she submit an abstract to the Society for Nutrition Education, many of
whose members are registered dietitians. Her abstract concluded that .
. . meal plans and recipes developed for nutritionists and dieticians
to use when designing diets to meet the Dietary Guidelines, the dietary
recommendation of the American Heart Association or the Prudent Diet have
been examined for trans fatty acid content. Some diet plans are
found to contain approximately 7% or more of calories as trans
fatty acids. The Abstract Review Committee rejected the submission, calling
it of limited interest.
Early in 1985 the Federation of American Societies for Experimental
Biology (FASEB) heard more testimony on the trans fat issue. Enig
alone represented the alarmist point of view, while Hunter and Applewhite
of the ISEO, and Ronald Simpson, then with the National Association of
Margarine Manufacturers, assured the panel that trans fats in the
food supply posed no danger. Enig reported on University of Maryland research
that delineated the differences in small amounts of naturally occurring
trans fats in butter, which do not inhibit enzyme function at the
cellular level, and man-made trans fats in margarines and vegetable
shortenings which do. She also noted a 1981 feeding trial in which swine
fed trans fatty acid developed higher parameters for heart disease
than those fed saturated fats, especially when trans fatty acids
were combined with added polyunsaturates.24
Her testimony was omitted from the final report, although her name in
the bibliography created the impression that her research supported the
FASEB whitewash.25
In the following year, 1986, Hunter and Applewhite published an article
exonerating trans fats as a cause of atherosclerosis in the prestigious
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition26,
whose sponsors, by the way, include companies like Procter and Gamble,
General Foods, General Mills, Nabisco and Quaker Oats. The authors once
again stressed that the average per capita consumption of trans
fatty acids did not exceed six to eight grams. Many subsequent government
and quasi government reports minimizing the dangers of trans fats used
the 1986 Hunter and Applewhite article as a reference.
Enig testified again in 1988 before the Expert Panel on the National
Nutrition Monitoring System (NNMS). In fact she was the only witness before
a panel, which began its meeting by confirming that the cause of America’s
health problems was the overconsumption of fat, saturated fatty acids,
cholesterol and sodium. Her testimony pointed out that the 1985 FASEB
report exonerating trans fatty acids as safe was based on flawed
data.
Behind the scenes, in a private letter to Dr. Kenneth Fischer, Director
of the Life Sciences Research Office (LSRO), Hunter and Applewhite charged
that the University of Maryland group continues to raise unwarranted
and unsubstantiated concerns about the intake of and imagined physiological
effects of trans fatty acids and . . . they continue to overestimate
greatly the intake of trans acids by typical Americans. No one
other than Enig, they said, has raised questions about the validity
of the food fatty acid composition data used in NHANES II and. . . she
has not presented sufficiently compelling arguments to justify a major
reevaluating.
The letter contained numerous innuendos that Enig had mischaracterized
the work of other researchers and had been less than scientific in her
research. It was widely circulated among National Nutrition Monitoring
System agencies. John Weihrauch, a USDA scientist, not an industry representative,
slipped it surreptitiously to Dr. Enig. She and her colleagues replied
by asking, If the trade association truly believes ‘that trans
fatty acids do not pose any harm to humans and animals’. . . why are they
so concerned about any levels of consumption and why do they so vehemently
and so frequently attack researchers whose finding suggest that the consumption
of trans fatty acids is greater than the values the industry reports?
Maryland researchers argued that trans fats should be included
in food nutrition labels; the Hunter and Applewhite letter asserted that
there is no documented justification for including trans acids
. . . as part of nutrition labeling.
During her testimony Enig also brought up her concerns about other national
food databases, citing their lack of information on trans. The
Food Consumption Survey contained glaring errors—reporting, for example,
consumption of butter in amounts nearly twice as great as what exists
in the US food supply, and of margarine in quantities nearly half those
known to exist in the food supply. The fact that the data base is in
error should compel the Congress to require correction of the data base
and reevaluation of policy flowing from erroneous data, she argued, especially
since the congressional charter for NHANES was to compare dietary intake
and health status and since this data base is widely used to do just that.
Rather than correction of the data base, [The] National Nutritional
Monitoring System officials responded to Enig’s criticism by dropping
the whole section pertaining to butter and margarine from the 1980 tables.
Enig’s testimony was not totally left out of the National Nutritional
Monitoring System final report, as it had been from the FASEB report three
years earlier. A summary of the proceedings and listing of panelists released
in July of 1989 by Director Kenneth Fischer announced that a transcript
of Enig’s testimony could be obtained from Ace Federal Reporter in Washington
DC.27 Unfortunately, his report
wrongly listed the date of her testimony as January 20, 1988, rather than
January 21, making her comments more difficult to retrieve.
The Enig-ISEO debate was covered by the prestigious Food Chemical
News and Nutrition Week 28—both
widely read by Congress and the food industry, but virtually unknown to
the general public. National media coverage of dietary fat issues focused
on the proceedings of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as
this enormous bureaucracy plowed relentlessly forward with the lipid hypothesis.
In June of 1984, for example, the press diligently reported on the proceedings
of the NHLBI’s Lipid Research Clinics Conference, which was organized
to wrap up almost 40 years of research on lipids, cholesterol and heart
disease.
The problem with the 40 years of NHLBI-sponsored research on lipids,
cholesterol and heart disease was that it had not produced many answers—at
least not many answers that the NHLBI was pleased with. The ongoing Framingham
Study found that there was virtually no difference in coronary heart disease
events for individuals with cholesterol levels between 205 mg/dL and
294 mg/dL—the vast majority of the US population. Even for those with
extremely high cholesterol levels—up to almost 1200 mg/dL, the difference
in CHD events compared to those in the normal range was trivial.29
This did not prevent Dr. William Kannel, then Framingham Study Director,
from making claims about the Framingham results. Total plasma cholesterol
he said, is a powerful predictor of death related to CHD. It wasn’t
until more than a decade later that the real findings at Framingham were
published—without fanfare—in the Archives of Internal Medicine,
an obscure journal. In Framingham, Massachusetts, admitted Dr. William
Castelli, Kannel’s successor the more saturated fat one ate, the more
cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people’s serum
cholesterol. . . we found that the people who ate the most cholesterol,
ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories weighed the least and
were the most physically active.30
NHLBI’s Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) studied the
relationship between heart disease and serum cholesterol levels in 362,000
men and found that annual deaths from CHD varied from slightly less than
one per thousand at serum cholesterol levels below 140 mg/dL, to about
two per thousand for serum cholesterol levels above 300 mg/dL, once again
a trivial difference. Dr. John LaRosa of the American Heart Association
claimed that the curve for CHD deaths began to inflect after 200 mg/dL,
when in fact the curve was a very gradually sloping straight line that
could not be used to predict whether serum cholesterol above certain levels
posed a significantly greater risk for heart disease. One unexpected MRFIT
finding the media did not report was that deaths from all causes—cancer,
heart disease, accidents, infectious disease, kidney failure, etc.—were
substantially greater for those men with cholesterol levels below 160
mg/dL.31
Lipid Research Clinics Trial
What was needed to resolve the validity of the lipid hypothesis once
and for all was a well-designed, long-term diet study that compared coronary
heart disease events in those on traditional foods with those whose diets
contained high levels of vegetable oils—but the proposed Diet-Heart study
designed to test just that had been cancelled without fanfare years earlier.
In view of the fact that orthodox medical agencies were united in their
promotion of margarine and vegetable oils over animal foods containing
cholesterol and animal fats, it is surprising that the official literature
can cite only a handful of experiments indicating that dietary cholesterol
has a major role in determining blood cholesterol levels. One of these
was a study involving 70 male prisoners directed by Fred Mattson32—the
same Fred Mattson who had pressured the American Heart Association into
removing any reference to hydrogenated fats from their diet-heart statement
a decade earlier. Funded in part by Procter and Gamble, the research contained
a number of serious flaws: selection of subjects for the four groups studied
was not randomized; the experiment inexcusably eliminated an equal number
of subjects with the highest and lowest cholesterol values; twelve additional
subjects dropped out, leaving some of the groups too small to provide
valid conclusions; and statistical manipulation of the results was shoddy.
But the biggest flaw was that the subjects receiving cholesterol did so
in the form of reconstituted powder—a totally artificial diet. Mattson’s
discussion did not even address the possibility that the liquid formula
diet he used might affect blood cholesterol differently than would a whole
foods diet when, in fact, many other studies indicated that this is the
case. The culprit, in fact, in liquid protein diets appears to be oxidized
cholesterol, formed during the high-temperature drying process, which
seems to initiate the buildup of plaque in the arteries.33
Powdered milk containing oxidized cholesterol is added to reduced fat
milk—to give it body—which the American public has accepted as a healthier
choice than whole milk. It was purified, oxidized cholesterol that Kritchevsky
and others used in their experiments on vegetarian rabbits.
The NHLBI argued that a diet study using whole foods and involving the
whole population would be too difficult to design and too expensive to
carry out. But the NHLBI did have funds available to sponsor the
massive Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial in which
all subjects were placed on a diet low in cholesterol and saturated fat.
Subjects were divided into two groups, one of which took a cholesterol-lowering
drug and the other a placebo. Working behind the scenes, but playing a
key role in both the design and implementation of the trials, was Dr.
Fred Mattson, formerly of Procter and Gamble.
An interesting feature of the study was the fact that a good part of
the trial’s one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar budget was devoted to
group sessions in which trained dieticians taught both groups of study
participants how to choose heart-friendly foods—margarine, egg replacements,
processed cheese, baked goods made with vegetable shortenings, in short
the vast array of manufactured foods awaiting consumer acceptance. As
both groups received dietary indoctrination, study results could support
no claims about the relation of diet to heart disease. Nevertheless, when
the results were released, both the popular press and medical journals
portrayed the Lipid Research Clinics trials as the long-sought proof that
animal fats were the cause of heart disease. Rarely mentioned in the press
was the ominous fact that the group taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs
had an increase in deaths from cancer, stroke, violence and suicide.34
LRC researchers claimed that the group taking the cholesterol-lowering
drug had a 17% reduction in the rate of CHD, with an average cholesterol
reduction of 8.5%. This allowed LRC trials Director Basil Rifkind to claim
that for each 1% reduction in cholesterol, we can expect a 2% reduction
in CHD events. The statement was widely circulated even though it represented
a completely invalid representation of the data, especially in light of
the fact that when the lipid group at the University of Maryland analyzed
the LRC data, they found no difference in CHD events between the group
taking the drug and those on the placebo.
A number of clinicians and statisticians participating in a 1984 Lipid
Research Clinics Conference workshop, including Michael Oliver and Richard
Krommel, were highly critical of the manner in which the LRC results had
been tabulated and manipulated. The conference, in fact, went very badly
for the NHLBI, with critics of the lipid hypothesis almost outnumbering
supporters. One participant, Dr. Beverly Teter of the University of Maryland’s
lipid group, was delighted with the state of affairs. It’s wonderful’
she remarked to Basil Rifkind, study coordinator, to finally hear both
sides of the debate. We need more meetings like this His reply was terse
and sour: No we don’t.
National Cholesterol Consensus Conference
Dissenters were again invited to speak briefly at the NHLBI-sponsored
National Cholesterol Consensus Conference held later that year, but their
views were not included in the panel’s report, for the simple reason that
the report was generated by NHLBI staff before the conference convened.
Dr. Teter discovered this when she picked up some papers by mistake just
before the conference began, and found they contained the consensus report,
already written, with just a few numbers left blank. Kritchevsky represented
the lipid hypothesis camp with a humorous five-minute presentation, full
of ditties. Edward Ahrens, a respected researcher, raised strenuous objections
about the consensus, only to be told that he had misinterpreted his
own data, and that if he wanted a conference to come up with different
conclusions, he should pay for it himself.
The 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference final report was a whitewash,
containing no mention of the large body of evidence that conflicted with
the lipid hypothesis. One of the blanks was filled with the number 200.
The document defined all those with cholesterol levels above 200 mg/dL
as at risk and called for mass cholesterol screening, even though the
most ardent supporters of the lipid hypothesis had surmised in print that
240 should be the magic cutoff point. Such screening would, in fact, need
to be carried out on a massive scale as the federal medical bureaucracy,
by picking the number 200, had defined the vast majority of the
American adult population as at risk. The report resurrected the ghost
of Norman Jolliffe and his Prudent Diet by suggesting the avoidance of
saturated fat and cholesterol for all Americans now defined as at risk,
and specifically advised the replacement of butter with margarine.
The Consensus Conference also provided a launching pad for the nationwide
National Cholesterol Education Program, which had the stated goal of changing
physicians’ attitudes. NHLBI-funded studies had determined that while
the general population had bought into the lipid hypotheses, and was dutifully
using margarine and buying low-cholesterol foods, the medical profession
remained skeptical. A large Physicians Kit was sent to all doctors in
America, compiled in part by the American Pharmaceutical Association,
whose representatives served on the NCEP coordinating committee. Doctors
were taught the importance of cholesterol screening, the advantages of
cholesterol-lowering drugs and the unique benefits of the Prudent Diet.
NCEP materials told every doctor in America to recommend the use of margarine
rather than butter.
Part 3
Part 4
References