The Fatty Acid Fiasco

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Oct, 2001  by Sherry A. Rogers

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Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol

Mary G. Enig, PhD

Bethesda Press, 12501 Prosperity Drive, Suite 340, Silver Spring, Maryland 20904 USA; 301-680-8600; fax 301-680-8100; www.bethesdapress.com; $29.95 US

I never pass up an opportunity to read a book by someone who is the world's leading expert in that subject. Such is the case with Dr. Mary G. Enig's latest book, Know Your Fats. I jokingly call her Dr. Trans Fatty Acid, as I don't know anyone more knowledgeable and at the same time vociferous for the cause.

Look at any disease. Let's take heart disease, the number one cause of death and illness in the industrialized world. What's the number one prescribed cardiovascular drug category? Calcium channel blockers. And why are the calcium channels so damaged that they need to be blocked? Because the wrong fatty acids have been used to build them.

Or look at the cholesterol craze sweeping the United States. Right now the official plan is to have one out of every five adults on a cholesterol-lowering drug. Now they weren't born with high cholesterol, so what happened along the way that suddenly made them lose their ability to properly metabolize cholesterol? Surely having high cholesterol isn't caused by a Mevacor deficiency. Besides, we all know that the HMG COA reductase inhibitors inhibit coenzyme Q10 synthesis, leading to hypertension and heart failure, not to mention the acceleration of multiple disease states, like Alzheimer's disease, by the induced cholesterol deficiency. As Harvard researchers have shown, the trans fatty acids induce hypercholesterolemia as well as hyper-triglyceridemia.

Or look at one of the new mysterious diseases like Syndrome X or insulin resistance. What it boils down to in large part is damaged cell membrane insulin receptors. How did they slowly become so damaged? By having their membrane components slowly replaced with trans fatty acids. Take any disease from depression to cancer. The integrity of the cell membrane reflects a lifetime of food choices.

If there's one dietary factor that we should all become experts on this year, that could bring the greatest medical benefit to the highest number of our patients, it would be to become experts in teaching them how to avoid trans fatty acids.

At a recent international symposium where I was lecturing, I was shocked when one of my colleagues told me he could not handle reading one more thing this year. He was "maxed out" and planned on canceling all of his medical journal and newsletter subscriptions and was not even going to read one more book. I know we all feel like this once in a while but to actually do it, he might as well hang out a sign "Closed for learning, for life." If he could fit in just one more book I would recommend Know Your Fats.

COPYRIGHT 2001 The Townsend Letter Group
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning