Page 28 - Summer 2017 Journal

IN MEMORIAM
FRED A. KUMMEROW, WAPF honorary board member and contributor to Wise Traditions, died on May 31st at age one hundred two. A German-born biochemist and lifelong con- trarian whose nearly fifty years of advocacy led to a federal government ban on the use of trans fatty acids in processed foods, he had been a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 1950.
Artificial trans fats—derived from the hydrogen-treated oils used to give margarine its easy-to-spread texture and prolong the shelf life of crackers, cookies, icing and hundreds of other staples in the American diet—were ruled unsafe by the Food and Drug Administration partly in response to a lawsuit that Professor Kummerow filed against the agency in 2013, two months shy of his ninety-ninth birthday. The ban, announced in 2015, goes into effect in 2018. In the 1950s, while studying lipids at the university, he analyzed diseased arteries from about two dozen people who had died of heart attacks and
discovered that the vessels were filled with trans fats. Professor Kummerow published his findings about the role of trans fats in 1957, a time when the prevailing view held that saturated fats like those found in butter and cream were the big culprit in atherosclerosis.
At first dismissed, he gradually won over key members of the scientific establishment. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, credited Professor Kummerow with inspiring him to include trans fats for analysis as part of Harvard’s highly influential Nurses’ Health Study, the results of which were published in 1993. One finding showed a direct link between the consumption of foods containing trans fats and heart disease in women. It was a turning point in scientific and medical thinking about trans fats.
Fred August Kummerow was born on October 4, 1914, in Berlin to a poor family. His father, a laborer, moved the family to the United States in 1923 to join relatives in Milwaukee, where he found a job at a cement block factory. Professor Kummerow said he would likely have been destined for similar work had he not received a chemistry set from his uncle on his twelfth birthday. “It opened the world of science to me,” he said.
He received a chemistry degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1939 and continued there for graduate studies. He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1943.
During and immediately after World War II, while conducting research into lipids at Kansas State University, Profes- sor Kummerow was awarded contracts by the Army Quartermaster Corps to help eliminate rancidity in frozen turkeys and chickens sent to troops overseas. A simple change in the poultry feed solved the problem, making possible the sale of frozen poultry in grocery stores.
Professor Kummerow was one of the first scientists to suggest that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats did not contribute to the clogging of arteries and was in fact beneficial in moderate amounts. This hypothesis, controversial at the time, was proved correct. His own diet included red meat, whole milk and eggs scrambled in butter.
CAROL ESCHE, MA, DNP, RN, NE-BC, WAPF honorary board member, died in October 2016 of metastatic breast cancer. Carol grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, where she graduated from Goucher College with a BA. Carol then went to Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned her nursing degree and later a DNP from Case Western Reserve. Carol also went to Princeton where she took various nursing courses and programs.
Carol was an advocate of providing real, nutrient-dense foods in hospitals and nursing facilities. As a consultant to the Weston A. Price Foundation, she helped set up Continuing Education Units for talks at Wise Traditions, in order to attract more nurses and other health professionals to the Wise Traditions diet.
Katherine Czapp, Carol Esche and Elise Stephinson receive the Activist Award at Wise Traditions 2004.
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Wise Traditions SUMMER 2017