Tag Archive for: Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life

The Bottom Line on Human Fat as Medicine

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The final question in our look at human fat is whether there are actual benefits to the use of human fat for human health. Human fat is primarily long-chain saturated fatty acids; we’re animals and that’s the type of fat animals make. There are some hormones present in fat tissue and probably other factors related to blood vessel growth, but there were no proven benefits for the use of human fat for anything related to human health 400 or 500 years ago.

Why not? Science had not yet begun to use research techniques to assess the benefits. I sometimes criticize randomized clinical trials and the way they’re conducted, but even with its faults, research is necessary to assess whether benefits exist for any chemical. At its core, that’s what human fat is: simply a chemical.

Could there be unknown benefits? We’ll most likely never know for two reasons. First, no Human Subjects Committee would approve the research for the use of human fat for research. The legal and scientific quandaries of using fat from some humans on other humans are mind-bending.

Second, even if some benefits could be proven, there’s the issue of collection. We do not dispose or treat corpses in the same way we did 500 years ago. Where would the human fat come from? Just the thought would be disturbing to many people.

The Bottom Line

The historical look at human fat as medicine illustrates why the scientific process is important and irreplaceable, flawed though it may be. It’s a slow process and can be frustrating, especially as it relates to nutrition. In today’s “get a product to market first” climate, we end up with too many nutritional products in a marketplace with little to no science behind them. That will be our topic for next week’s Memos.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Christopher Forth PhD. 2019. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life.

The Benefits of Human Fat

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Imagine that you woke up this morning with lower back pain; that’s not unusual for many people. You make it to your bathroom, pull out your nicely painted apothecary jar of human fat, and rub some into the painful areas. Or you have arthritis and you rub the human fat into your knees. No way, you say? Not if you lived in Europe in the 1600s. Human fat was thought to be able to heal and repair the body.

Not only that, it was thought it was able to heal wounds and promote the growth of connective tissue. How did they come to the idea that fat could help these conditions? There was supposed to be a spiritual quality to human fat that enabled these medicinal qualities, something that wasn’t present in fat from other animals or plants. Yes, they thought some of the dead person’s “vital force” was still there in the harvested fat.

Could there really be any medicinal benefit of human fat? We’ll take a look on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Christopher Forth PhD. 2019. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life.

How Are You Fixed for Axungia Hominis?

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When the title of any article is written in Latin, you might think that what follows is probably complicated. How about if you knew that Axungia hominis simply means “human fat”? What follows isn’t complicated but it sure is surprising—at least it was to me. I read an excerpt from a forthcoming book I’m adding to my reading list; it’s titled Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life by Christopher Forth PhD. It explores human fatness over the ages.

For the Memos this week, I’m going to focus on human fat from a different perspective: medicinal qualities. Medicinal qualities? Yes. That was the belief from the 16th century through the middle of the 19th century according to Forth.

The first question has to be: how did they collect human fat to use as medicine? From corpses, of course. An entire industry was developed to collect human fat, and getting it from the recently deceased was a logical source. Battlefields also provided many recently deceased corpses from which to collect fat. What surprised me was the entrepreneurial spirit of the executioners during those times; they were compensated for the hangings or beheadings and then sold the fat that was harvested from the bodies.

That’s enough gross stuff for today. What exactly made the fat so valuable? What was it supposed to be able to do? I’ll cover that on Thursday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Christopher Forth PhD. 2019. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life.