Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Author:John Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781932073553
Publisher: New World Library

Keeping Us Hooked

In its battle to keep Americans consuming high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol, the dairy industry has many friends. McDonald’s donates a “Nutrition Action Pack” to classrooms across the country. The material comes complete with the Golden Arches trademark at the bottom of each page and is something less than the unbiased nutritional presentation it pretends to be. The coverage of the four basic food groups represents the Bread and Cereal group with hamburger buns.

On September 21, 1983, McDonald’s ran a 16-page color insert in the Chicago Tribune that extolled the virtues of what it called a “properly balanced diet.” It was an interesting version of a properly balanced diet, in that it basically amounted to Big Macs, fries, and shakes. Extra copies of the insert were then distributed in the schools through the Chicago Board of Education. It was, in the words of the Aaron Cushman Public Relations Agency, “a combination textbook and advertisement.”

Another organization devoted to keeping us hooked on saturated fat and cholesterol is the National Livestock and Meat Board. After the American Heart Association came on record publicly indicting saturated fat and cholesterol as agents of heart disease, the Meat Board promptly began an extensive advertising campaign designed to discredit the American Heart Association. They actually tried to make it seem as if the vast majority of reputable scientists had never even heard of this “supposed” connection between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease. As Patricia Hausman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest noted:

To anyone who relied on the Meat Board for information, it looked like the American Heart Association had a few maniacs running its show, while the vast majority of scientists thought the diet-heart connection was hopelessly off base.69

In its ongoing effort to discredit the “theory” that saturated fat and cholesterol promote heart disease, the Meat Board has come up with one argument that has been particularly effective because it actually sounds eminently reasonable. You are supposed to believe that there is no reason to be concerned about your intake of saturated fat and cholesterol as long as your blood cholesterol count is normal.

But what is a normal blood cholesterol level? And furthermore, what is the advantage of being normal if that means an average that is already too high?

You see, if you go to a physician to have your blood cholesterol level tested, he or she will send a sample of your blood to a lab. The lab will then send the results back to your doctor. Your blood cholesterol level, usually called serum cholesterol or plasma cholesterol, will be expressed in units of milligrams per 100 milliliters (mg/ml), which is commonly called “milligram percent” (mg%). Usually, along with the actual figures, the lab will mark in the right-hand column whether each specific blood parameter for which they tested was found to be normal or abnormal. Most busy doctors simply run down the right-hand column looking for abnormalities. Many labs consider values up to 330 mg% to be normal, while other labs may set the cutoff point as low as 290 mg%.

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