32 Acidic Wastes: The Real Culprit
long-chain saturated fats in meat, making them available to the body
for energy production.
It’s advisable, however, to avoid eating large quantities of meat fat
because the enzyme lipase used to break down the meat fat is destroyed
when meat is cooked. Authors of books on holistic nutrition wax
enthusiastic about the cardiovascular health of the traditional Eskimos
who ate whale and seal fat as if it were candy. But the Eskimos ate their
fat raw. Raw fat leaves behind practically no acetone, the toxic by-
product of cooked fat that can cause degeneration of the heart and
arteries.
In the winter my husband and I often eat roast duck at a Hungarian
restaurant on the upper east side of Manhattan. We felt we were dam-
aging our arteries, eating what was essentially nine-tenths saturated fat
and one-tenth meat—until I read that in the Gascony region of France
where people are known for their longevity, duck and goose fat make
up almost all the fat in the diet. People in this region cook everything
in duck fat, snack on fried duck skin, spread goose or duck fat on bread,
and eat liver pâté (foie gras), which is 87 percent duck or goose fat.
Despite this high intake of cooked, saturated fat that contains no fat-
digesting lipase, out of 100,000 middle-aged Frenchmen in this region,
only 80 die of heart attacks yearly, whereas in the rest of France the
number is 145. In the United States, 315 out of 100,000 middle-aged
men die of heart attacks each year.^15 Further proof that the longevity of
people in this region—ninety-fi ve-year-olds are common—is due to
their consumption of duck and goose fat is the fact that in a part of the
region where people eat the most fat, having foie gras three or four
times weekly, they live longer than in areas where foie gras is eaten only
once a week. Scientists speculate that the health benefi ts of duck and
goose fat could be due to the similarity of their molecular structure to
that of olive oil.
The low death rates from heart disease of people who eat duck and
goose fat, however, could also be due to their custom of drinking one
or two glasses of red or white wine, an equal amount of mineral water,
and a salad whenever they eat duck or goose.
Olive oil has received a great deal of favorable publicity in recent
years. Some people refer to it as the miracle oil because of the longev-
ity of the inhabitants of the islands off the coasts of Italy, Greece, and
Spain who consume huge amounts of it. In Sardinia, where cancer