by Raine Saunders

Created on: August 13, 2009   Last Updated: August 15, 2009

We are living in a world where fats in our diet have been increasingly feared and avoided for nearly five decades. Things are finally beginning to change. With epidemic numbers of people experiencing heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and cancer, health experts and professionals are really starting to examine the significant correlation between diet and health condition.

Heart disease was almost non-existent in the United States until the 1920s, which was just decades after the inception of the Industrial Revolution - an occurrence which altered forever the face of agriculture, manufacturing, mining and transportation. With the advent of packaged and processed foods, diseases and illness previously not observed began to surface.

So what's this business about red meats and other fats being unhealthy for us to consume? Make no mistake, doctors have historically been inclined to advise patients to steer clear of saturated fats and cholesterol. But it isn't a coincidence that these guidelines have been in place for the last fifty or so years and disease numbers have been on the rise. In fact, there are various studies and research done by medical personnel which concluded that saturated fats and cholesterol were not the cause of heart disease, and were actually essential to health. If saturated fats are really the culprit of heart disease, there should be a corresponding increase in the consumption of animal fat in the American diet. However, a decrease of animal fat consumption has actually occurred more and more over the last fifty plus years.

Here's what we learned: from 1910 to 1970, the proportion of traditional animal fat in the American diet declined from 83 to 62 percent, and consumption of butter also decreased from eighteen pounds per person per year to four. Cholesterol in the diet increased by only about one percent in the last eighty or so years. In the same time span, the percentage of dietary vegetable oils in the form of refined oils, butter substitutes, margarine, and shortening went up about 400 percent. At the same time, we have observed the intake of processed foods and sugar rising by about 60 percent.

The reason red meat and saturated fats are under such scrutiny is because the majority of what people consume in the way of these foods is the industrially-produced variety. That's right - industrially produced. What does that mean? It means most of the food people are eating comes from conventional, commercial,

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