Ever since the initial fat and cholesterol scare in the 1950s, many health enthusiasts have shied away from animal products and some have even adopted vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. Unfortunately, the initial research which caused such widespread fear or fat and cholesterol was fundamentally flawed.
In the 1950s researcher Ancel Keys conducted what is now popularly known as the 7 Countries Study. Keys published findings that showed that the countries with the highest saturated fat consumption and cholesterol had the highest rates of heart disease. The problems with his study were two fold.
The first was that Ancel Keys omitted the data from the vast majority of the countries in his study. He only published the 7 that supported his findings, and when all countries were included, he had nothing to work with. Second, he study said nothing about causation, meaning it in no way demonstrated that either saturated fat or cholesterol caused heart disease. Despite creating a large body of evidence, subsequent studies have also failed to implicate either of these nutrients in causing heart disease, or virtually any other common disease.
One issue here is that standard low fat, low cholesterol diets are typically less healthy than whole food diets that include meat, fish, poultry and other animal products. These diets, despite being slightly higher in dietary cholesterol lower LDL cholesterol naturally, and lead to better overall health.
The bigger issue with these dietary guidelines, however, is the dangers for uninformed vegetarians and vegans who fail to get sufficient vitamin B12, which occurs almost exclusively in animal products. So what does vitamin B12 do? It helps with proper functioning of the brain, nervous system and hemoglobin formation in blood. B12 deficiency often leads to anxiety, depression, exhaustion and higher incidences of many disease, particularly those related to brain function.
To this day, studies implicating animal products as a cause of heart disease are flimsy at best and downright contradictory at worst. Meat, especially organic or pasture-raised meat, is an important part of a healthy diet, and B12 deficiency is far more detrimental to health than eating animal products will ever be.