{"id":749,"date":"2023-05-13T04:22:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-13T04:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2017\/06\/11\/fred-kummerow-hero-of-the-trans-fat-battle\/"},"modified":"2023-05-17T17:23:35","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T17:23:35","slug":"fred-kummerow-hero-of-the-trans-fat-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=749","title":{"rendered":"Fred Kummerow, Hero of the Trans Fat Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fred Fred Kummerow died at age 102 of arteriosclerosis, the disease that he had spent most of his life working to prevent.<\/div>\n
\u2022 He was the first researcher to show that trans fats in margarines and many processed foods caused plaques to form in arteries (Science<\/em>, 1957;126:698\u20139). \u00a0At age 100, he was finally successful in suing the FDA to ban trans fats from our foods.\u00a0 Before they were banned, trans fats had been linked to more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Kummerow showed that LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream is harmful only after it has been oxidized.<\/div>\n
\u2022 He was one of the first scientists to propose that it is not the saturated fat or cholesterol in meats, dairy and eggs that cause heart attacks. \u00a0Now it appears that other components of these foods may be responsible for their links to heart attacks, strokes and various other diseases<\/a>.<\/div>\n
\u2022 He also showed that the “healthful” vegetable oils could become unhealthful when oxidized or damaged by high temperatures during processing or cooking,<\/div>\n
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A Life in Science<\/strong><\/div>\n
Kummerow was born into poverty in Berlin, Germany on October 4, 1914, just after the start of World War I. \u00a0 He remembered that his family didn’t have enough food to eat, so his mother would put him and his brother to bed during the day so he wouldn’t burn calories by being active. When he was eight, his father got a job in a cement factory in Milwaukee and brought his family to the United States.<\/div>\n
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At age 12, Fred Kummerow received a chemistry set that sparked his lifelong passion for science. \u00a0He was able to go to the only high school in Milwaukee that offered three years of chemistry classes. \u00a0At age 25, he was graduated from the University of Wisconsin and four years later he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry. \u00a0In his first job at Clemson University in South Carolina, his research helped prevent thousands of deaths from pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin B3. After World War II, he showed that he could prevent frozen packaged chicken and turkey from turning rancid by changing the feed that was used to raise them. \u00a0In 1950, he was appointed professor at the University of Illinois and worked in his lab there for 67 years, until a year before his death. \u00a0He wrote more than 450 articles in scientific journals.<\/div>\n
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