It turns out that you were right not to trust the science; steaks, eggs, and cholesterol have always been good for you.

Sure, the Agricultural Revolution—the spread of fixed-field cultivation from the Near East about 10,000 years ago—introduced grains to human diets in a way that was unheralded, causing a whole lot of pain and also giving rise to civilization as we know it. However, for the vast span of our time as modern humans—approximately 200,000 years—the healthiest people have been those who’ve centered their diets around nutrient-dense animal foods. And what animal foods provide in abundance is cholesterol, along with the highest-quality protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, cofactors, and miraculous substances whose properties we’re only beginning to explore and discover.

Every group Weston Price found in “perfect health” on his journey valued animal foods packed with cholesterol above all else.

The importance of nutrient-dense, cholesterol-rich animal foods cannot be understated. The book that I consider to be the greatest resource on nutrition is Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), which I’m sure you’ve probably never read, even if you’ve actually heard of it. Price was a dentist in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Cleveland, Ohio, who went on a globe-trotting adventure with his wife in an attempt to understand why his patients’ faces, particularly those of children, appeared, quite literally, to be collapsing before his eyes. Cavities were not only becoming a more serious problem; his patients’ jaws, inner mouths, cheeks, and noses were not developing properly either. Price suspected the cause was a changing diet and the increasing prevalence of industrially produced foodstuffs (refined grains, canned goods, sugar syrups). His thesis was supported by comparing the diets of traditional small-scale societies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australasia, and Polynesia.

Whether it was the Inuit eating prodigious quantities of salmon, salmon eggs, and caribou, high-Alpine Swiss farmers and their diet of rye bread, butter, cheese, and milk, or East African pastoralists who only consumed meat, milk, and blood from their cattle—every group Weston Price found in “perfect health” on his journey valued animal foods packed with cholesterol above all else.

I often say that if Nutrition and Physical Degeneration had been the foundation for the emerging discipline of nutritional science, we’d be living in a very different world today. But instead, cholesterol became the most demonized substance in all health, except tobacco, and now we’re paying the price.

  By Pax Americana

Cholesterol’s demonization has much to do with the emergence of the first modern processed foods and novel ingredients like seed and vegetable oils. The so-called “lipid-heart hypothesis” that is, eating cholesterol causes blockages in the arteries, resulting in heart disease and ultimately death—was cooked up by a quack “nutritionist” named Ancel Keys in the 1940s, whose sole claim to authority was his role in the creation of the K-Ration during World War II. His hypothesis succeeded—not because it was right, but because it was backed by big money from the margarine industry, who wanted to market their products as healthier than traditional animal fats.

The campaign against cholesterol continued following President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955 while in office. Suddenly, heart disease was a national security issue. In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked his surgeon general, William H. Stewart, to issue a warning against egg consumption, citing their cholesterol content. Why? He wanted people to stop complaining about inflation and the price of eggs. It’s the only official warning ever issued against a particular food in American history.

We can reconstruct a detailed history of how and why cholesterol became the pariah of nutritional science, but it’s quickest to reckon with the outcome: disaster. We were promised renewed health, including an end to heart disease. Instead, we’ve become sicker and more dependent on the medical industry than it would even have been possible to imagine. Heart disease, far from disappearing, is the leading cause of death in the US, claiming over 2,500 lives per day. Moreover, 70% of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, and rates of chronic conditions—from autism and irritable bowel syndrome to Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer—have exploded.

Of course, the turn away from cholesterol isn’t the sole cause of this predicament. It’s the loss of animal-based nutrition in the standard American diet; it’s the toxic additives in processed foods; it’s sedentary lifestyles, exposure to harmful chemicals, stress, electromagnetic frequencies, and blue light from screens—the whole package of lifestyle changes we’ve experienced in recent decades. Nevertheless, avoidance of cholesterol served as the principal justification for the massive changes to diet and to our view of health that have taken place, and their impact cannot be overstated.

The errors of fledgling nutritional science threaten to be compounded now by moves towards a global, plant-based diet, which has three goals: to save our health, to save the planet—animal agriculture emits more greenhouse gases—and to feed the planet, whose population is predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. I wrote a whole book called The Eggs Benedict Option, which explained why a global plant-based diet would be a nightmare for human health. And not only that, but for human freedom as well, since it would complete the transfer of ownership of the food supply to corporations, affording them even greater control over our lives.

But there is an alternative path: a New Golden Age of Cholesterol. A silent revolution has taken place in our understanding of this molecule in recent decades as we’ve come to see how vital it is to hormonal health, growth, mental health, and other critical functions. Steve Reichman, for example, discovered cholesterol’s critical role in building muscle mass, demonstrating that cholesterol may have a higher impact on muscle gain than protein.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture stopped making dietary cholesterol recommendations for the first time since 1980. Congratulations, you now have free rein to consume as much cholesterol as you want now that the government finally caught up to what science has been telling us loud and clear: dietary cholesterol is not linked to dangerous blood cholesterol levels.

Make America Healthy Again has arrived, with maverick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is an iconoclast, a man who is no stranger to challenging corporate monopolies and bad science that only serve moneyed interests. Now is the perfect time for the quiet revolution to start breaking some windows and tearing down the false idols of phony nutrition and restoring the sacred image of the healthy body.

Imagine this. Instead of prescribing a pill for what ails you—perhaps your testosterone is reading a little low and you’re feeling unmotivated and a bit anxious—your doctor tells you to eat a big fat grass-fed ribeye steak cooked in butter every night and to get some sunlight and exercise. We’re closer to that than you might think—much closer. That means we’re finally getting back to our roots and the accumulated wisdom our ancestors guarded for hundreds of thousands of years until we thought we could do better. The verdict is in: we—not them—are more the fools.

Raw Egg Nationalist is the co-founder of Kindred Harvest and the author of the Eggs Benedict Option.