Your reasoning would suggest that the most “heart-smart” way to eat wheat is to eat the whole stalk, most of which is not digestible; next best would be whole unhulled seed; next the uncracked seed; as a last resort, raw whole-wheat flour.
Indeed, some among the community that question the Lipid Hypothesis go that far. They think processing – as in, man manipulating food in some way – is what destroys the nutritive value of food. I agree with your reductio ad absurdum – the intervention of mankind isn’t what makes certain foods bad.
However, when the more cogent of the dissenters talk about “processed foods,” they mean just what progressiveman1 mentioned: refined sugar, hydrogenated oils, white flour. These food products (and similar items like high-fructose corn syrup and texturized vegetable protein) are the evils to the skeptics. They could keep repeating the long list of food items every time they wanted to talk about them, or they could use a neologism or a compound word. They stick to “processed foods,” and what they mean is just this short list of foods – not all products that have ever been manipulated by a human. The complaint isn’t about processing; it’s about the effect that these specific foods have on men.
Mainstream opinion is fairly well settled; the skeptics, however, are a diverse bunch. Most skeptics (as well as most non-skeptics) are irrational people. The people that rally around Weston A Price focus on the nutritive value of the foods they eat; the cholesterol skeptics have a wide range of different hypotheses, ranging from homocysteine to excess carbohydrate intake; and there are a handful of independent personalities, like Mercola, that have a grab-bag of complaints.
So where’s the science?
The Anti-Coronary Club Trial was started in the late 1950s. By November 1966, 26 of the “Club members” had died, eight from heart attacks, compared to 6 deaths (none from heart attacks) in the control group.
Seymour Dayton reported in 1969 on a study of 850 veterans. The study group saw their cholesterol droop 13% lower than the controls, and 30 fewer members died from heart disease. Hurrah, right? Significantly more of the study group died from cancer. When autopsied, there was no difference in the amount of atherosclerosis between the two groups. Statin trials have shown similar results: lowering your serum cholesterol indeed lowers your risk of death from heart disease – you’ll just die from cancer, or stroke, or something else, instead. The statin proponents don’t like talking about mortality.
The four-and-a-half year Minnesota Coronary Study included more than 9000 men and women; half served a low-cholesterol, low-saturated fat, and high-polyunsaturated fat diet, while the other half received a “typical American diet.” The cholesterol-lowering diet was associated with an increased rate of heart disease. 269 on the diet died, compared to 206 eating the normal fare.
A 1957 study on 5400 male employees at Western Electric looked at (among other things) the 15% of the men that ate the most fatty food and the 15% that ate the least. After four years, 14 new cases of heart disease showed up in the high-fat group and 16 in the low-fat group. After two decades, the study was revisited: “the amount of saturated fatty acids in the diet was not significantly associated with the risk of death from [CHD]”.
The Framingham Heart Study was launched in 1950 and followed 5100 residents, re-examining them every two years. The risk for heart disease among the men with high cholesterol was five times the risk of men with cholesterol levels under 200 - but this correlation disappeared with age, was substantially lower for women, and was completely absent for women over 50. The study director said, “the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people’s serum cholesterol…” I’ve seen the Framingham study cited as proof that high serum cholesterol causes heart disease, but that isn’t what that study demonstrated at all. It demonstrated correlation, not causation, and most importantly only among a subset of the population.
There’s Mann’s research into the Masai, who consumed solely animal products yet had low cholesterol and no heart disease until they moved into neighboring Nairobi and started eating traditional Western diets. Studies of native populations in Alaska and the Yukon showed similar results.
Here are a handful of other studies showing no link between dietary fat and heart disease:
Navajo Indians: Page et al 1956
Irish immigrants in Boston: Trulson et al 1964.
Swiss alpine farmers: Gsell and Mayer 1962.
Benedictine and Trappist Monks: Groen et al 1962.
Samburu: Shaper 1962.
The Helsinki Mental Hospital Study ran from 1959 to 1971, and their cholesterol-lowering diet seemed to reduce heart-disease deaths by half. This study is frequently cited by those supporting the Lipid Hypothesis. What about all of these other studies? You can’t pick and choose your evidence.
while Eskimos are known to eat blubber.)