Fats & Facts

Doctors still differ about many details of the relationship between a high-fat diet and the high death rate from coronary disease in the U.S., but more and more are coming to a practical conclusion: cut down on the fats without waiting for all the facts. At the same time, they recommend a substantial switch from hard, saturated fats of animal origin to cooking oils of vegetable origin. After Cleveland's Dr. Irvine H. Page suggested that such a diet change was due for wide-scale trial (TIME, Jan. 5), Nutritionist Norman Jolliffe reported that 79 men. aged 50 to 59, enrolled in a New York City project dubbed the "Anti-Coronary Club." had stuck to such a diet for at least six months and gone about their normal business uncomplaining. But many a housewife still asks: Is a lowered-fat, cholesterol-reducing diet practical in the average home?

Last week Minneapolis' Physiologist Ancel Keys and his wife, Biochemist Margaret Keys, answered yes in Eat Well and Stay Well (Doubleday; $3.95), addressed to laymen as well as doctors. Although he insists that coronary disease and early deaths from heart attacks undoubtedly have many causes, Dr. Keys reasons that an excess of cholesterol in the blood is almost certainly a danger signal. Also, there is evidence suggesting that high-fat meals increase the danger of blood clots, commonest cause of heart attacks.

"Sunday Every Day." The trouble, says Dr. Keys, is that for 50 years technical progress and higher standards of living have added too many rich, fatty items, formerly luxuries, to the everyday U.S. diet--"Sunday dinner is no longer special . . . We have Sunday every day." Americans who used to get an estimated 30% of their daily calories in fats now get 40% or more in that form; Keys recommends a cutback to between 25% and 30%. More important, only about half of this fat should be saturated (the chemists' way of saying that the available carbon atoms in the molecule all have hydrogen atoms attached), and the rest unsaturated.

Some key Keys warnings:

P: It makes little or no difference how much preformed cholesterol is in the diet (egg yolks and organ meats are full of it), because this does not get into the blood; what counts is the fat from which the body manufactures cholesterol.

P: Starches have been downgraded too drastically in the U.S. dietary revolution --some of them are not "empty calories, ' but rich in vitamins, and should be eaten to make up the calorie deficit caused by cutting down on fats.

P: Fancy-packaged, usually fancy-priced preparations of unsaturated fats, to be taken as medicine or used in cooking, are usually no better than plain corn or cottonseed oil.

For All Ages. A major obstacle to changing U.S. diet patterns has been the attitude of the meat and dairy industries. Authors Keys and Keys tackle both head on. For children, they see no objection to milk, but no advantage in stuffing them with butter and ice cream. For adults, they would cut all three of these items sharply. The dairy industry, they argue, could actually increase its market by concentrating more on skim milk, low-fat protein milk and plain cottage cheese --good for all ages. As for meat, the most expensive cuts of beef are the fattest, but the biggest difference can be made in pork. By feeding hogs soybean or peanut meal, but not fattening them beyond about 180 lbs., say Keys and wife, .the farmer could produce flavorful meat, and its accompanying fat would have the virtue of being relatively unsaturated.

To help the housewife translate all these dietetic data into dishes, Margaret Keys has filled half the book with menus for every day for all four seasons, and recipes for everything from almond cakes to zucchini.

Western researchers are willing to credit Russian colleagues with notable contributions to the study of fats and heart disease. The reverse is not true, the Canadian Medical Association Journal complained last week. Political ideology apparently is more potent than scientific solidarity. It quoted a Soviet internist, Professor I. Gurevitch, as writing in Klinicheskaya Meditsina that the campaign to reduce fats in the diet is a capitalist plot--"advantageous to the ruling classes, who are at present engaged in lowering the living standard of the masses, in lowering their wages and in raising the price of food and particularly of fat. The masses in capitalist countries suffer from a shortage and not from an excess of fat."

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