The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them

5. FISHY FATS

FIVE FISHY FATS A bend in the stalk can be seen, but not a bend in the heart. MAORI SAYING DYERBERG AND BANG HAD NO IDEA THAT THEIR WORK WOULD UPSET the apple cart of Keys’s model. Not after their first trip to Greenland in 1970. Not even after Dyerberg visited Ralph Holman in Minnesota and learned the name of the fatty acid that was so prevalent in the red blood cells of Eskimos. Eicosapentaenoic acid was, after all, a polyunsaturated fatty acid; and polyunsaturates, as Keys had come to acknowledge, lower the cholesterol in an individual’s blood. The presence of high levels of eicosapentaenoic acid in the Eskimos’ blood would nicely explain why their serum cholesterol was low despite their high intake of fat and cholesterol. And their low serum cholesterol would explain their low rate of heart disease in terms of the classic model, which depicts cholesterol as accumulating in blood vessels and eventually reducing blood flow to the heart. But on Dyerberg and Bang’s second trip to Greenland, in 1972, a trip on which they hoped to show that the unusual fats in the Eskimos’ blood did indeed come from the fats in their unusual diet, the two Danish physicians made the mistake of freeze-drying their food samples (instead of deep-freezing them 54 or freeze-drying them under nitrogen), thereby exposing them to oxygen under low pressure and destroying many of their unsaturated fatty acids. The incorrect values they got when they ran those freeze-dried samples on their gas-liquid chromatograph contradicted Keys’s theory and equations and opened their minds to new ideas about the mechanisms and causes of heart disease. It was a fortunate error; by the time they realized their mistake and returned to Greenland to collect new samples, in 1976, they were well on their way to initiating a coup. Not that it was immediately recognized as such. In the United States, in 1976, the prevailing opinion was that “nutrition science has developed essentially all the basic knowledge that is necessary ” to determine what people should be eating in order to reduce their risk of diet-related cancers and heart disease, as Dr. Gio Gori of the National Institute of Cancer told the U.S. Senate ’s Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which was chaired by George McGovern. Linoleic acid had been accepted as an essential nutrient for humans in the 1960s. But very few people were suggesting that alpha linolenic acid, or any other member of the omega-3 family, might be essential as well. In 1984, six years after Dyerberg, Bang, and their collaborators in England published a paradigm-altering paper in Lancet— “Eicosapentaenoic Acid and Prevention of Thrombosis and Atherosclerosis?”—the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published its Consensus Development Conference Statement on cholesterol, advising Americans that the most effective way to prevent heart disease was to reduce their intake of dietary cholesterol and other fats. The scientists who signed on to this infamous consensus statement (“infamous” because dissenting researchers point out that the conclusions were anything but a consensus) seemed unaware that a family of important nutrients was in the process of being recognized as essential. And that FISHY FATS 55 these nutrients not only are fats themselves but have a profound influence on the way that other fats, cholesterol included, are moved around the body. Dyerberg and Bang’s second trip to Greenland took place during the summer of 1972, the same time of year as their previous trip. Gas-liquid chromatography was still fairly new, and there were only a few reports on the fatty acid content of different foods. But it was known that fish, especially cold-water fish like salmon, were full of polyunsaturates. The two Danish researchers wanted to know if this was true for whale and seal meat as well—and whether those polyunsaturates included eicosapentaenoic acid. So Bang and Dyerberg returned to one of the communities they had visited before, Igdlorssuit (literally, “the place of big houses,” though its dwellings were only slightly more commodious than those in nearby settlements), and asked seven of the people who had participated in their earlier study to provide them with duplicate amounts of all the foods they ate during one week. The researchers would, of course, pay them for these foods and for their trouble, negotiating the price with each participant over coffee. After receiving...