Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
Ghee has been produced and consumed on the Indian subcontinent for approximately five thousand years.
The Rigveda, among the oldest texts in continuous human use, describes ghee in ritual and in dietary contexts. The word itself appears hundreds of times across Vedic scripture. Ayurvedic medicine, which formalised traditional Indian health practices from approximately 600 BCE onwards, describes ghee as the pre-eminent therapeutic food: building ojas, the vital essence, strengthening tissues, supporting digestion, carrying the active compounds of medicinal herbs into the body.
This is not mysticism, though it was framed mystically. It is a functional observation that a fat-soluble medium improves the bioavailability of fat-soluble compounds: which is an accurate pharmacological observation that predates the concept of pharmacology by two millennia.
Ghee is clarified butter: milk simmered gently until the water evaporates and the milk solids separate, leaving pure butterfat. It is stable at room temperature for months without refrigeration. It contains vitamins A, D, E, and K in the fat-soluble forms that the body absorbs most readily. It contains butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid that feeds intestinal cells and reduces inflammation. It contains conjugated linoleic acid from the grass-fed cattle that traditionally produced it.
Traditional Indian cooking, in virtually every regional cuisine, across vast geographical diversity, used ghee as the primary cooking fat. Not as an occasional luxury. As the standard.
Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Western fat hypothesis reached India.
Indian public health institutions, exposed to the same Ancel Keys-derived dietary guidance that was reshaping Western nutritional thinking, began recommending reduced saturated fat intake. Ghee, saturated, traditional, expensive, was targeted. Vanaspati, a partially hydrogenated vegetable oil product that mimicked the texture of ghee at much lower cost, had been introduced by Hindustan Unilever in the 1930s. It was now promoted as a modern, healthy alternative.
Vanaspati is, by composition, a trans-fat delivery system. It is one of the worst things you can eat. The hydrogenation process that made liquid vegetable oil solid produced trans fatty acids at concentrations, by some analyses, up to 53% of total fat, that make the most demonised animal products look benign.
India swapped ghee for vanaspati. Then for refined seed oils as those became cheaper still.
The Rajasthan Gupta study, published in the 1990s, found significantly lower rates of coronary heart disease in rural men who consumed more than 1 kilogram of ghee per month, compared to those consuming less. The Malhotra study had found the same thing in 1967. Multiple subsequent studies have found no harmful effect of ghee consumption on cardiovascular outcomes.
And yet.
A population that had cooked in ghee for five thousand years without appreciable cardiovascular disease adopted seed oils on the advice of a nutrition establishment that had decided, on the basis of some cherry-picked data, that saturated fat was the problem.
India's cardiovascular disease rate between 1960 and 2000 showed approximately a twofold increase in rural areas and a sixfold increase in urban areas.
The country replaced ghee with seed oils.
The country got significantly more heart disease.
Nobody in any official capacity has proposed that these facts might be related.
Ancel Keys is not available for comment.
He died in 2004.
His dietary guidelines are still in circulation.
