Mysterious Fats Fuel Disease More Than We Knew, New Research Reveals
Adeadly contaminant stopped thousands of people’s hearts, resulting in their deaths, but nobody knew why. Then, in the 1950s, biochemist Fred Kummerow scraped open their arteries and found a lethal fat that had come from their food. As he learned, different fats in our diet are the determinants of health and disease, and control who lives and who doesn’t.
“It’s simple, if it jiggles, it’s fat,” Arnold Schwarzenegger once said. How wrong he was. Yes, there are everyday fats like cooking oils, lard, and heavy cream. These are just the tip of the fat iceberg, as recent science has shown.
The heart attacks Kummerow studied were caused by a specific fat in processed foods, just one of many fatty molecules. But now another deep and enduring mystery has scientists scratching their heads: Why does Nature use thousands of fat molecules, when a small number should suffice?
A new generation of ultrasensitive chemistry technologies has indeed discovered thousands of rapidly shifting fat molecules in the human body that impact nearly all aspects of health. Tracking changes in these fatty molecules predicts future onset of a wide variety of diseases, from heart, brain, and liver diseases to infectious diseases, organ failure, and many cancers, and offers radically new treatment approaches using both diet and drugs.The heart attack victims had clogged arteries, Fred Kummerow found after examining more than 20 people who died of heart attacks. Trans fats were the culprits — he found vessels clogged with this fat, which is abundant in processed foods. He concluded that thousands of people die from trans fats each year and launched a campaign to ban these fats, which was finally implemented in 2018, 70 years after his first observation.
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