The role of dietary polyunsaturated fats in heart disease and atherosclerosis

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August-Sept, 2003 by Wayne Martin

In the April 2003 issue of the Townsend Letter there was a letter saying that an article in the Feb/March issue was so much junk. Professor Steve Austin ND had expressed his outrage over the suggestion that saturated fats are good, made by Teri Johnson and John Teta in their article.

These authors may be commended for their report with the title "The Healthy Side of Saturated Fats." They did well in telling of the antiviral properties of the highly saturated coconut oil. They also left out much of great importance on the subject.

These authors opened up a subject that has amounted to the orthodox medical establishment causing close to 500,000 deaths a year in the USA that are iatrogenic deaths, deaths caused by doctors.

Let's review a bit about the disease of the heart now called myocardial infarction. There has been since 1955 a concept, now engraved in stone, that the saturated fats, butter and lard, are the BAD fats that are causing a pandemic of heart attack deaths and the new, as of 1925, polyunsaturated vegetable fats are the GOOD fats that prevent one from having a heart attack.

What so enraged Professor Austin was that Johnson and Teta had suggested that this may not be so.

Let us go back briefly to 1874. Doctors wore frocked coats then as a badge of being doctors. They would do surgery and child delivery in their coats and get them caked with dried blood. Florence Nightingale once said that doctors need not hang up their coats in a closet. They were so stiff with dried blood that they could be stood up in a corner. Being so dirty, doctors were infecting and killing one mother in five in child delivery and they were infecting and killing one surgery in two.

In 1874, Louis Pasteur was a low paid teacher of chemistry at a school for training teachers in Paris. He had one of the only microscopes in France and he was looking at bacteria with it. He had decided that bacteria were causing disease and death. In 1874 he had a stroke and had lost much of the use of his left hand and foot. In the Franco Prussian war, Prussian artillery had destroyed his college and he was out of work. It was then that he received a letter from Dr. Joseph Lister in Scotland. Lister had devised aseptic methods in child delivery and surgery and had almost abolished deaths from post surgery and post child delivery infections. He thanked Pasteur for his teaching that made this possible. Pasteur showed the Lister letter to the French Senate and was voted a life time pension of $1,000 a month.

Pasteur first made his vaccine against chicken cholera. In 1880 he read his report before the Academy of Medicine in Paris and then he told the doctors there that it was time for them to clean up and stop killing mothers at childbirth. Doctors there were enraged. They laid hands on Pasteur and gave him the bum's rush out of the hall into the street and challenged him to a duel.

Pasteur's Work with Vaccines

Pasteur then made his vaccine against anthrax. This time he read his report before the Academy of Science where he held the Chair in Minerology. There were no doctors there but there were members of the news media. The next morning there was an editorial in one newspaper which read "Up with Pasteur's germs and down with dirty doctors." The entire news media picked up on this story. Doctors for their part just knew that there were no such things as germs and this insane chemist was completely wrong. All they had to do was to bring in the news media and have Pasteur test his vaccine on sheep. They were certain that it would all end in a great fiasco and doctors could continue being as dirty as they liked for as long as they liked.

What the world saw that morning on June 5, 1881 were 25 unvaccinated sheep dying in agony of anthrax and 25 vaccinated healthy sheep.

All over Europe overnight doctors got out of their frocked coats and turned to Lister's aseptic methods in child delivery and surgery. But in the USA doctors took no note of the Pasteur anthrax trial. They continued to be dirty for eight more years.

Pasteur would have been nothing without the news media. It took Pasteur and the news media to get doctors in the USA to at last clean up in 1889. Meanwhile Pasteur had developed his rabies vaccine and it was effective in treating a person bitten by a rabid dog for 21 days after being bitten, but not for a day longer.

In the summer of 1889, two young boys of a very poor family in New York City were bitten by the same rabid dog. There was none of the Pasteur rabies vaccine in the USA for to orthodox doctors in the USA there were still no such things as germs.

The editor of the New York Herald had for eight years believed in the work of Pasteur. He bought, for the boys, steamship tickets to France and for a doctor to go with them. Then every day this editor wrote a front page editorial telling the Pasteur story. His editorials were rerun by newspapers in many parts of the world.

There was no radio then so for eleven days nothing would be heard from the boys while at sea. There was however the Trans Atlantic cable. Pasteur knew of the boys coming and he had said that it was going to be a very close call for them. My grandmother Martin told of prayer meetings for the boys throughout the midwest of the USA.