Illustrated History of Heart Disease - Alan Watson

Illustrated History of Heart Disease 1825-2015

August 19, 2012 by Alan Watson  Diet Heart News         

1825 French lawyer and gourmand Brillant-Savarin publishes The Physiology of Taste, in which he says he has identified the cure for obesity: “More or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury.”
1830 Sugar consumption in the US: 15 pounds per capita (much of it molasses). Today: 150 pounds per capita (much of it high fructose corn syrup).
1863 William Banting published Letter On Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Banting had lost 85 pounds on a high fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet. The British Medical Journal and Lancet reported that Banting’s diet could be dangerous: “We advise Mr Banting, and everyone of his kind, not to meddle with medical literature again, but be content to mind his own business.”
1880-1910 U.S. population doubled from 37 to 75 million. One out of three people lived on a farm – and ate from the farm. The U.S. population today is over 300 million and about 1 percent live on a farm.
1906 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle exposed unsanitary and inhumane conditions in Chicago area slaughterhouses. Reported meat sales fell 50 percent and took years to recover. As is true today, the highest quality safest meat to eat was grown on the small mixed farms that dotted much of the American landscape.
1910 Lifetime risk of type II diabetes: 1 in 30. The lifetime risk today is 1 in 3 according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.
1910 Butter consumption = 18 pounds per capita. When we were using high quality butter lavishly, mortality from heart disease was below 10 percent. (Infections killed a majority of people; a high percentage of infants and women of child-bearing age died during the birthing process.) Today as we consume our “Country Croak,” the mortality from heart disease is 40 to 45 percent. Both Dr. Andrew Weil and the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins agree: “Eat butter; not margarine, regardless of the claims the manufacturer is making for it!”
1910 Lard, the rendered fat from pigs raised outdoors, was the #1 cooking fat – enjoying 70 percent of the market. Lard was the best source of Vitamin D and a good source of palmitoleic acid, a monounsaturated anti-microbial fatty acid that kills bacteria and viruses. Today highly processed soybean oil has 70 percent of the market; zero vitamin D. Now the same experts who told us not to eat lard are telling us we are deficient in Vitamin D!
1911 Proctor & Gamble introduce Crisco, first shortening made from hydrogenated vegetable fat. P & G bought the patent for hydrogenation from an English company that was attempting to make candles out of the artificially hardened fat. When rural electrification wiped out the candle market, P & G saved the day by providing the world with Crisco, a cheap alternative to lard. Crisco featured a much longer shelf life and, over decades, gave unsuspecting Americans hundreds of millions of pounds of trans fatty acids.
1918 The electrocardiogram was introduced helping to launch cardiology.
1920 Sugar consumption in the US reaches 100 pounds per capita – and climbing.
1921 The hormone insulin is discovered.
1924 Four cardiologists found the American Heart Association (AHA).
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