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another fat that fights cancer and infections.
    • Pastured pork and lard are rich in antimicrobial fats and the monounsaturated fat oleic acid— the same fat in olive oil, which reduces LDL.
    • Pastured eggs are rich in vitamins A and D. They contain omega-3 fats, which prevent obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and depression. Egg
     yolks contain lecithin, which helps metabolize cholesterol.
    Cholesterol. This word alone can stop a story about food in its tracks. The thought of rich, sweet cream has barely taken shape before
     the evil ingredient cholesterol flutters by, landing smack-dab in the worry corner of the brain to spoil the reverie. I know
     what you're thinking. Aren't saturated fats and cholesterol dangerous? I don't think so.
    Let's first agree that Americans are right to be worried about diet and health. Since 1900, once-rare conditions— obesity,
     diabetes, and heart disease— have become rampant. These three are known as the diseases of civilization, because for most
     of human history they were all but unheard of. (Three million years ago, if you were obese or diabetic or your heart failed,
     you would soon be dead.) In the United States today, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are chronic diseases. They can be
     deadly, but just as often, they're a condition people live with, thanks to a combination of drugs, surgery, and diminished
     quality of life— as in "I'm too fat and out of breath to play catch with my dog." People with type 2 diabetes survive on insulin
     injections. In 1950, most heart attacks were fatal. But today, thanks to major medical advances, more Americans with chronic
     heart disease are living longer. Certainly, enabling people to live with chronic disease is a sign of progress. Preventing
     disease is another— the one that interests me.
    The reader might object that life in the Stone Age was different. For the hunter-gatherer couple, it was nasty, brutish, and
     short; he might be gored by a mastodon and she was apt to bleed to death while giving birth. We, on the other hand, live much
     longer, with ample time to grow old and to develop degenerative diseases. How do we know the meat-loving hunter-gatherers
     would not have keeled over from hardened arteries, too, had they managed to survive to sixty-five?
    Good question. Loren Cordain, an expert in Stone Age diets, looked into this one. In most hunter-gatherer groups, 10 to 20
     percent are sixty years or older— and in fine health. "These elderly people have been shown to be generally free of the signs
     and symptoms of chronic disease (obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels) that universally afflict the elderly
     in western societies," he says. "When these people adopt western [industrial] diets . . . they begin to exhibit signs and
     symptoms of 'diseases of civilization.'" So much for the idea that age equals disease.
    Let's next agree that the experts are right: diet does affect blood. The study of blood cholesterol and its various subcategories
     is getting more sophisticated by the hour, but the conventional wisdom holds that it's better for high-density lipoprotein
     (HDL) to be high and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) to be low. Casually known as the "good" and "bad" cholesterol hypothesis,
     this idea emerged when it became clear that the number they call "total cholesterol" was a poor— very poor— predictor of heart
     disease. Today, most experts believe that low HDL and high LDL are "risk factors" for heart disease, which means the two conditions
     are statistically correlated.
    But I'm not so sure. There are two important caveats to the rule that high LDL, in particular, is dangerous. The first is
     a lesson from Statistics 101: correlation does not necessarily imply cause. In other words, high LDL does not necessarily cause heart disease. Instead, it could be a symptom (or marker, as experts say) of heart trouble. The second caveat is equally serious: many studies show that high LDL and heart