Nina Teicholz Distorts the Fatty Acid Content of Wild Animals

direct link  African Buffalo

I have recently revisited Chapter 1, The Fat Paradox, in The Big Fat Surprise, and it's safe to say that Nina Teicholz's contentions about the diets of Native Americans are grossly inaccurate.  The "all the Indians ate meat" is rounded out by a British physician named Prentice who visited South Central Africa and attributed rampant meat eating to the natives there as well.  An then (begins at location 327 of 12033 in Kindle version):

... no savvy heart disease researcher can read these historical observations without raising a standard and reasonable objection, namely, that the meat from today’s domesticated animals is far more fatty— and a greater proportion of that fat is saturated— than was the meat from wild animals roaming around a hundred years ago. Experts argue that the meat from wild animals contained a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats, which are the type found in vegetable oils and fish. IV  If wild animals contained less saturated fat, the argument goes, then early carnivorous populations would have consumed less of this fat than people eating meat from domesticated animals today.

Let's pause to object to the use of the term carnivorous.  Most human cultures, even tribes who based their diets on buffalo, were not carnivores.  Humans have been, and always will be, highly adaptable omnivores who will eat an all animal diet only if forced to by the environment.  Even then, as soon as contact is made with other cultures, this funny thing called trade always seems to happen to both bring variety and alleviate periods of extreme scarcity -- e.g. starvation.  

Let's also be instructed by Nina by her rare numbered-inline footnote:

IV. This objection reflects a reality about meat— that it contains a mixture of different kinds of fats . Half the fat in a typical cut of beef, for example, is unsaturated, and most of that fat is the same type (monounsaturated) that is found in olive oil.  Half of chicken fat is unsaturated, and 60 percent of lard is unsaturated. (Asserting that animal fats are synonymous with saturated fats is, therefore, a simplification, although because saturated fats are found mainly in animal foods, I will also resort to the same simplification in this book, for the sake of brevity.)

Ahh yes.  Those who counsel eating less animal food/fat as a means to lower saturated fats are oversimplifying things.  Those unscientific fools are trying to mislead you because Large Lardo didn't have the money to wine and dine folks like Big Olive did.   She, on the other hand, will take any shortcut she needs for brevity.  That's allowed you see.  And yet, as she fails to achieve brevity, she uses the simplification to distort facts over, and over, and over ... throughout the book.  Realize that the end of her Introduction includes a chart of fat sources (incomplete -- missing some obvious sources such as nuts and avocados -- and  inaccurate -- canola is over 60% MUFA, ~20% O6, ~10% O3 PUFA but she lists it under O6 PUFA while MUFA source lard is less than 50% MUFA)  before she launches into a listing of populations whom she claims eat mostly meat (listed on that chart under saturated fat).  The reader is reminded these are saturated with the Masai.  There is no mention that the fat the Inuit ate is highly UNsaturated.    But ... Now Teicholz is going to set the record straight on this wild animal are full of PUFA nonsense!

It is true that American beef from a cow raised on grain does have a different fatty-acid profile from an ox hunted in the wild. In 1968, the English biochemist Michael Crawford was the first to look at this question in detail. He had the Uganda Game Department send him the muscle meat from various kinds of exotic animals: the eland, hartebeest, topi, and warthog, plus a giraffe and a few others. He compared these meats to those of domesticated cows, chickens, and pigs in England and reported that the meat of the wild animals contained ten times more polyunsaturated fats than did the flesh of domesticated ones. Thus, on its surface, his paper seemed to confirm that modern-day people should not consider their domesticated meat to be anywhere near as healthy as hunted meat from the wild. And for the past forty-five years, Crawford’s paper has been widely cited, forming the general view of the subject.

As the paleos continue to fawn over the dairy fat promoting Teicholz, they ought to check their own grassfed tales ...  But the bolded part above is the set up.  Before I go on, here is the study to which she refers:  FATTY-ACID RATIOS IN FREE-LIVINGAND DOMESTIC ANIMALSPossible Implications for Atheroma.  Lancet, June 1968.  (request access)

You see, all of those *others* who cite Crawford in lock step following the mainstream line are doing just that ... blindly going along with the crowd.  And now for the main act in the center ring, Nina Teicholz will distort the work of yet another scientist while besmirching his character with her innuendo.  It's quite an act!!

What Crawford buries in his data, however, is that the saturated fat content of the wild and domesticated animal meats hardly differed at all.  In other words, the factor that was supposedly dangerous in red meat was no higher in the English cows and pigs than it was in Uganda’s beasts. 

No.  Crawford did NOT bury anything in his data.  The above is wrong.  For someone so fluent in percentage of percentages math, Teicholz is pretty bad at recognizing when applying some might be appropriate.  From Crawford:

Lipid Content of Meats, Wild and Domestic

Of note, this is the "muscle meat" with the usually associated fat from the butcher.   Even when the domestic meat is meticulously separated from any visible fat, e.g. lean meat, the fat content is more than twice that of the wild buffalo.  Before the removal of fat, the domestic meat has more than eight times the total fat content compared with wild buffalo.  Crawford also noted in the text that there was wide variation in the fat content from domestic cattle (SEM = 7.22 is over 25% of mean, wild SEM is less than 10%).  Note the highlight as well, that significantly larger samples of wild buffalo were required to obtain sufficient lipid for analysis.  Continuing on in the Crawford paper ...

PUFA vs. SaFA+MUFA Content of Wild vs. Domestic Fat

It is interesting to note that the "parks" buffalo were essentially "grassfed".  While the pre-pop-era paleo line was one emphasizing the overall PUFA content of wild meats vs. domestic, it is important to understand that "grassfed" is at best the equivalent of the "parks" buffalo above.  Note that true wild buffalo (woodland) contain three times as much PUFA compared to even the "parks" variety.  While much closer than domestic, it is still a considerable difference.  

 Fun fact:  Wild buffalo contains more PUFA than canola oil 

Some Big Fat Fractions ...

Before moving on, a little check of the math here.  Elsewhere in the book, Teicholz insists that Americans have reduced dietary fat intake since the 1970's because fat used to comprise 43% of calories and now comprises 33%.  Leaving aside for a moment that this is a lie based on Teicholz's source for these values, those numbers have been further percentaged to claim a 25% reduction in fat intake.  Any way you look at it, though, percentages are a slice of a pie (cauliflower crusted stevia sweetened cow pie) and when one goes up, the other must go down and vice versa.  Since we're talking about different types of fat making up the whole here, as demonstrated in Table II above, when PUFA content is increased in proportion, the combined MUFA+SaFA content must be reduced.  

From Table I, we know that wild meat contains roughly one-ninth of the fat of domestic meat, and less than one-half the fat of meticulously separated domestic muscle.  One way the percentage of saturated fat could be greater in domestic animals vs. wild while the total saturated fat content remained the same between species would be if wild animals contained more total fat.  The opposite is actually the case.  So I've constructed a table based on data from Crawford:

As you can see, per 100 grams of meat, you're getting almost 25 grams combined of saturated and monounsaturated fat, while you get only 2 grams from the buffalo.  Even IF the ratios of SaFA to MUFA differ wildly, there is almost no mathematical way to support the contention that saturated fat did not differ.  If 100% -- all 2 grams -- of the combined amount is saturated in the wild buffalo, then the domestic cattle would have to contain 22.7 grams of MUFA, a value that would put MUFA:SFA ratio at 9:1 which is not in keeping with what we know about ruminant fats.  Rather, Crawford's data supports the statement that  domestic beef contains more than 10 times the saturated fat of wild buffalo. 

Teicholz's POOP

Having just demonstrated the near impossibility that the relative proportions of SaFA to MUFA could rescue the day, I'll return to the rest of Teicholz's discussion of the Crawford paper and what he is accused of hiding amidst his data.  She writes: 

Instead, the domesticated animals turned out to be higher in monounsaturated fats, which is the kind found predominantly in olive oil.  So whatever the differences between wild and domesticated animal meat, saturated fat was not the issue.

I'm adding this much emphasis here to accentuate just how brazen a lie this is.  Below is Figure 1 from Crawford, with some labeling added by me.

I did my best to estimate the percentages of the content for the beef and wild buffalo.  My totals come close for the wild but are a little low for the domestic by about 2 percent.  I can live with that.  Feel free to pad the MUFA for the domestic beef by 2% ;-) 

Yes, the oleic acid (18:1 MUFA) content of domestic beef is considerably higher than that of the wild buffalo ... roughly 10% of total fat content higher.  But both the total MUFA and the total SaFA contents are higher in the domestic beef.  

So I put this information together with the table I previously conducted from Tables I and II (I adjusted the totals to Crawford's percents though the 98.8 is likely a typo, it's inconsequential).

So ... according to Crawford's analysis, domestic beef in the UK in the mid-to-late 1960's, any way you look at it, saturated fat content is STILL an issue.  This is because:

• While domestic cattle contains more SaFA and MUFA compared with wild buffalo, this is due to lower PUFA content.
• The ratio between SaFA and MUFA in domestic vs. wild meat appears to be virtually unchanged.
• While the PUFA:SaFA:MUFA percents for wild buffalo can be loosely rounded to 30:40:30, the pattern is dramatically different in domestic beef which is virtually devoid of PUFA and the ratios could be loosely rounded to 0:55:45.
• The fatty acid distribution taken together with the overall fat content of domestic beef is 14% by weight for domestic beef and only a smidge over 1% by weight for wild buffalo.

Where did Teicholz get her statements?  Not from the Crawford paper.  Rather they were POOPed out.  

  POOP = Pulled Out Of Posterior 

At some point, this woman needs to be held to account for her gross mischaracterizations of her often difficult-to-obtain sources.  There was nothing hidden in Crawford's data, though as you can see through my analysis here, some of the comparisons needed to be teased out by presenting the same data in different formats.   None of this supports Teicholz's assertions.  Quite the opposite.

The Rest of Chapter 1 ...

For the remainder of the chapter, Teicholz goes on to bring up the usual arguments for why it isn't the meat we should be concerned with anyway.  We're told about the fatty organ meats, and how our ancestors were able to pick and choose year round from various species and herds to sample only the fattiest of animals from which to excise only the fattiest of parts, leaving the rest to the vultures.  I'll have at this romanticized paleonotion in a future post.  But since Teicholz cites the Crawford paper, I thought I'd leave you with the opening words from the paper itself:

Introduction

THE amount and type of dietary fat may be related to atheroma (Ahrens et al. 1958, Funch et al. 1960). Death from arterial disease is correlated with a high intake of animal fat, protein, and calories (Yerushalmy and Hilleboe 1957) and it is likely that the animal fats and the calories are more relevant than the protein (Katz et al. 1958, Keys 1963). That the nature of the fat may be important is suggested by the fact that polyunsaturated fatty acids can protect the artery from damage in experimental situations (Thomas and Hartroft 1959, O’Neal et al. 1959, Wissler et al. 1962, Moore and Kon 1963, Kim et al. 1965).

The work on experimental atheroma tends to implicate, in some way, animal fat or carbohydrate (Sandler and Bourne 1963, Roberts and Strauss 1965). In this context, I have previously asked if, by examining data from a prosperous Western community, we may be dealing with an abnormal state (Crawford 1964, 1967).

Ahrens, Keys, Yerushalmy & Hilleboe, all together in one paragraph.   As we all know, however, it turns out carbohydrate is the real culprit in atheroma [ /sarcasm]