Instead they tell us the refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid — the pasta, rice, bread etc should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet. In an effort to cut out all the fat the food manufactures have retooled all their factories. Today food is labelled “low fat”, “fat free”, “reduced fat”, “99% fat free”, “30% lower fat” or “cholesterol-free” in an attempt to sell us something that’s supposedly good for us. Its big business to the extent that it is often difficult to find real food in shops, and the food manufacturers are making a fortune as we stuff our faces with these packaged foods in an attempt to be healthy.
While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it and western governments especially in the US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth. Has science really shown that eating less fat is healthy for you? Has going low fat reversed the obesity epidemic and allowed us all to fit our favourite jeans again? Are we becoming healthier and reducing the incidence of degenerative disease?
The truth is if eating fat specifically saturated fat caused obesity and disease, we would be well on our way to being thinner and healthier. Actually we would all look like supermodels. But despite the fact that we have been steadily decreasing our consumption of fat and cholesterol and exercising more than ever before, we don’t look anything like supermodels. In fact we are going in the wrong direction, getting fatter and fatter, sicker and sicker and soon we will look more like a sumo wrestler than a supermodel! Something must be wrong?
What if the opposite is true and fat is not a greasy killer? What if fat including saturated fat is a natural and healthy part of your diet? After all if god didn’t want us to consume any fat then wouldn’t he have produced animals that were low fat or saturated fat free? What if Dr. Atkins was right all along or partly right in that some people need more fat than people. Atkins stated way back in the early 1970’s much to the anger of the medical community that fat is not the primary nutritional evil in our diet. He and others have since managed to sell millions of copies of books promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart’s desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, they said, was harmless and if we eat fewer carbohydrates we will be thinner and enjoy a healthy old age.
Furthermore over the past five years, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus on fat. The best example is the conclusions taken from the Harvard School of Public Health study. This US research is the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Its results clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message and the idea that all fat is bad for you; and suggest the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may be one of the key foundations of our obesity epidemic.
The Fat reality is people have heard only half the story. Fats are actually important building blocks for the cells of your body, as well as for key hormones. Certain fats are essential to help you see, think and move. They are a natural part of our diet and always have been. As with all foods you must consume high quality fats, the correct fats and avoid the bad ones. There are fats that heal as well as fats that kill such as the unnatural deadly trans fats produced by modern food manufacturing. Everybody has been told to avoid the fats that kill, but the importance of the fats that heal which are essential for our health has been neglected. If you know only half the story – if you think that all fats are bad – then it makes sense that you would avoid all of them. This article will give you the complete story on fats, which ones to eat for health and which ones to avoid and why it’s probably the over consumption of refined carbohydrates that’s making your pants tight!
WHAT IS FAT?
Fat is the bodies’ largest source of energy (calories). A healthy man who carries 15% of their total body weight as fat (most of you reading this article will have at least this amount), has a fatty energy reserve of 12% of their bodyweight – enough to run 240 km! The other 3% is essential body fat that acts as insulation and cushioning of vital organs and building blocks for the cell membranes of your body. Dietary fat, specifically saturated fat transports the fat-soluble vitamins and unsaturated omega fats from vegetable and seafood sources supplies the body with essential fatty acids needed for many vital functions in your body such as moving, thinking and seeing.
GOOD AND BAD FATS
The essential omega fats
As dieters know only too well, your body does a brilliant job of making fats from any food. But there are two "essential" fats it cannot make – linoleic acid (omega-6) and alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3). By definition, essential fats must come from food; our body cannot make them but must have them to be able to live. In reality if you don’t get enough essential fats, your health deteriorates.
These essential fats are unsaturated fats, their curved shape produces, chemical keys, that fit specific locks of your body. They provide the raw materials used to make all the special fats that form part of the structure of your brain, eyes, ears, testes, ovaries and the membranes that surround every cell in your body. Without these essential fats in your diet, you could not think, see, reproduce, run, or even move a muscle. Therefore when ever dietary supply is inadequate all of these functions decline. It clear to see then how important essential fats are to your health.
Today with all these highly processed foods, it’s difficult to get enough and the proper ratio (1:1 ratio of omega-3 to 6 is best) of essential fats in our daily diets without supplementation. In the average diet, you’re probably getting very few Omega-3’s, and way too many Omega-6’s. In fact, we’re way overbalanced (a 30:1 ratio of omega-6 to 3 is the average today). To redress the balance you could eat omega 3 rich foods such as, cold-water fish like salmon, sardines, albacore tuna, mackerel, rainbow trout, herring etc. Or as a safeguard, many experts are recommending we supplement our diet with an essential oil blend with the correct ratio of omega- 3 and omega- 6 fats – such as Udo’s choice or a quality fish oil product.
Don’t let experts scare you – saturated fats are actually healthy
We have all been told that the saturated fat found primarily in meat and dairy products, elevates blood cholesterol levels. This in turn raises the likelihood that cholesterol will clog arteries, a condition known as atherosclerosis, which then increases risk of coronary artery disease, heart attack, and untimely death. However, despite decades of research, its still not been shown that the consumption of saturated fats above recommended levels by anyone who’s not already at high risk of heart disease will increase the likelihood of untimely death.
Despite what the so called health experts and media says saturated fat is a natural healthy part of our diet as long as its from an organic source (non organic meat often contain large amounts of toxins stored in its fat). From a Palaeolithic perspective, humans have eaten animal products for all of our existence on earth and therefore, we have always consumed saturated fats. From the moment we leave our mothers womb we are programmed to eat saturated fat and cholesterol. Mother’s milk provides a higher proportion of cholesterol than almost any other food. It also contains over 50% of its calories as fat, much of it saturated fat. Both cholesterol and saturated fat are essential for growth in babies and children, especially the development of the brain. If the evidence is studied correctly its clear to see saturated fat provides us with lots of health benefits including:
• The preferred fuel for the heart
• A major part of the phospholipid component of cell membranes
• Used as a source of fuel during energy expenditure
• Transports the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K.
• Actually increases HDL concentrations – the good type of cholesterol
• Modulator genetic regulation and prevent cancer (butyric acid)
• Useful antiviral agents (caprylic acid)
• Effective as an anticaries, antiplaque and anti fungal agents (lauric acid)
• Useful to actually lower cholesterol levels (palmitic and stearic acids)
• Beneficial effects on thrombogenic and atherogenic risk factors (stearic acid)
Yes saturated fat will elevate your bad cholesterol, but what you’ve probably not been told is that they will also elevate your good cholesterol. For example more than two-thirds of the fat in a steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it’s true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your good cholesterol (H.D.L.). If saturated fats were of no value or were harmful to humans, evolution would not have established them as a major food source. Despite the high profile anti fat campaign there is absolutely no evidence that when eaten within normal dietary levels they are harmful. Furthermore a recent study in one of the world’s top nutritional journals (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) has also come to the conclusion that saturated fat is actually healthy for you.
The deadly Trans fats
Modern manufacturing processes, that produce oils that are pure, have no smell with an enhance shelf life transform healthy healing essential fats into unnatural dangerous killing trans fats. Trans fats are vegetable oils that are partially hydrogenated. Adding hydrogen to the oils makes them solid at room temperature, a characteristic that makes them useful in the production of various foods. But this hydrogenation results in the formation of large amounts of toxic products that are not found naturally in nature and therefore have no place in the food chain.
To produce such oils the curve in the essential fats is straightened out, thereby loosing the shape that’s essential to fit the locks in your body. If you look under a microscope Trans fat look more like plastic than fats and who wants to eat plastic? They are deadly for health because in the absence of a supply of healthy essential fats, your body has to compromise with using trans fats. In cell membranes for example, trans fats because they dont have the right shape cause the protective membranes to leak, allowing toxic substances to enter the cell. This has been linked to a long list of detrimental effects: they double your risk of heart attack and, in research studies, have been shown to do a number of other not-very-pleasant things. For example, they interfere with liver function and insulin function and make your platelets stickier. They’re correlated with low-birth-weight human babies. They lower immune responsiveness, increase abnormal sperm and interfere with pregnancy with animals (4). Regrettably trans fats are everywhere in modern foods such as margarine’s, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, soup mixes, breads, cookies, frozen foods, candies, dry soups, donuts, and French fries – all kinds of things.
What the food manufacturers don’t want you to know!
Many food manufacturers are more concerned with having a longer shelf-life than people’s health. They try to hide the fact their product contains trans fats by writing hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated on the label. By reading the labels of food before buying them you can eliminate many of the bad Trans fats from your diet. So if you see the ‘H’ word on the label, get the ‘H’ out of there. Thankfully the government is now trying to limit the amount of trans fats in our foods.
Eat less saturated fat and live longer?
For 40 years, this has stood as one cornerstones of nutritional advice given to us. But have the so called experts ever proven that low fat means a longer healthier life? No! Worse still for many people fat is not the greasy killer we’ve been told but that many of you may become fatter and sicker if you follow the low fat advice. In fact The Japanese (who also consume more cholesterol than most westerners), the Swiss, Austrians and Greeks all consume high fat diets but are the people who live longest. Furthermore as the Mediterranean people became wealthier they ate more meat and saturated fats but there life expectancy increased. So the eat less saturated fat and live longer hypothesis, just doesn’t fit the facts!
Furthermore cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease but rather a potent antioxidant weapon against free radicals in the blood, and a repair substance that helps heal arterial damage (although the arterial plaques themselves contain very little cholesterol.) However, like fats, cholesterol may be damaged by exposure to heat and oxygen. This damaged or oxidized cholesterol seems to promote both injuries to the arterial cells as well as a pathological build up of plaque in the arteries. Damaged cholesterol is found in powdered eggs, in powdered milk (added to reduced-fat milks to give them body) and in meats and fats that have been heated to high temperatures in frying and other high-temperature processes.
How much fat should you eat?
Studies clearly show that despite great compliance to low saturated fat diets, there is a wide difference in responses. This absolutely supports the concept of metabolic typing. Metabolic typing is a fantastic tool that allows you to determine the correct ratio and amount of proteins, fats and carbohydrates for your unique body. Its results predicts one-third of people will do very well on low saturated fat diets, but also one-third of people need high saturated fat diets to stay healthy and one-third are somewhere in the middle. One of the first things you should do if you are interested in your long term health is to determine your metabolic type and eat accordingly
LOW FAT, FAT FREE MARKETING – THE CREATION OF FRANKENSTEIN FOODS!
The modern concept of eating healthy has become synonymous with avoiding dietary fat. This has led to the creation and marketing of thousands of reduced-fat and fat free food products. They have become big business filling much of our supermarket shelves. With billions of kroner spent on these products every year an entire research industry has arisen to create palatable non fat substitutes, and billions more spent yearly by the food industry marketing the less-fat-is-good-health message. The government supports this industry in an indirect way via the promotion of the Food Guide Pyramid, which recommends that fats and oils be eaten "sparingly." This misguided message is continuously reinforced by many physicians, nutritionists, journalists, health organizations.
As a result fat has been removed from many foods and new reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks etc created. The problem is fat had to be replaced with something just as tasty and pleasurable to the palate otherwise people won’t buy it! This is usually in the form of sugar, artificial colors, preservatives, sweeteners and lots of other deadly chemicals, which have never been proved to be safe and have no place in your body. So today we eat more and more starches and refined carbohydrates, because calorie for calorie, these are the cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce, and they can be sold at the highest profit. This has resulted in our sugar consumption increasing from 0.5kg per person in 1900 to over 75kg today. It gets worse as all the chemicals that have been added to food have resulted in us consuming over 10kg of them a year. Think what all this nasty stuff is doing to your insides?
So with the indirect help of the government and so called experts the food industry has created a new market with a brand-new manufactured food, given then a brand-new fancy name, put a big advertising budget behind it, and made enormous profits at the expense of our health. You can’t do that with fruits and vegetables. It’s harder to differentiate an apple from an apple, unless you are comparing an organic apple to one that’s been treated with fertilisers and other harmful chemicals. Furthermore the notion that fat makes you fat and carbohydrates are harmless has never been proven in fact the opposite for most people is probably true!
LOW FAT LIE – DOES LOW FAT ACTUALLY MAKE YOU FAT NOT THIN?
Many people assume that because fat has nine calories per gram compared to four calories for carbohydrates and protein, cutting fat from the diet is the best way to loosing weight? Furthermore if a food contains no fat, they can eat as much of it as they want, after all, they are fat-free! Unfortunately life is not that simple. In fact cutting fat from your diet as you can see from the facts below will probably give you what you are desperate to avoid – more fat:
1. Most of the low-fat and fat-free products people eat to cut down on their fat intake have as many calories as their full-fat versions and are loaded with unhealthy toxic chemicals to make them palatable and increase there shelf life. Often peoples liver and kidneys cant detoxify and get rid of these chemicals. So the body has to store them. Where do you think they get stored? The safest place is in your fat cells, resulting in your body producing more fat to store these toxic substances. This is one of the reasons why many people when they go on a diet feel terrible as there body has to release the chemicals to loose the fat. Its much simpler, healthier and easier on your waistline not to eat the chemicals in the first place!
2. Cutting down on the fat you eat can make you even more hungry, as fat does a very good job of satisfying your appetite
3. If people eat less total fat, they will eat more carbohydrates and probably less protein, because most protein comes in foods like meat that also have considerable amounts of fat. Here you risk not getting enough protein to maintain your muscle mass. A decrease in muscle mass is a disaster for people wanting to loose weight. As your amount of muscle your body has plays a major part in determining your metabolism and therefore the number of calories you burn every day. Any weight loss program should do everything to avoid loosing muscle via eating enough quality protein to provide the building blocks and exercising (weight training is best) to provide the stimulus to maintain your muscle mass.
4. The calories people “save” via a reduced fat intake are usually replaced by eating extra carbohydrates. However its not extra healthy fruits and vegetables, people eat instead it’s the unhealthy refined carbohydrates such as bread, pasta etc. and that’s a problem, mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars, grain products and concentrated sugars. These were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture which was only 10,000 years ago. In fact many scientists believe it’s these so called high-glycemic index carbohydrates that are making us fat.
HIGH GLYCEMIC INDEX FOODS – THE DIETERS DEVIL
For many individuals, especially people of northern European race still living in our relatively cold climate, it might actually be easier to gain weight on low-fat/high-carbohydrate regimens than on higher fat diets. One of the many factors that influence hunger and whether you burn or store fat is the glycemic index, which measures how fast carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars in your intestine and moved into the bloodstream. Any time your blood-sugar levels increase, your pancreas secretes insulin. Insulin’s primary role in the body is to regulate blood-sugar levels. Researchers have shown that eating high-glycemic index foods (which all cause a rapid rise in blood sugar after a meal) such as bread, pasta, breakfast products (cornflakes etc) , sweets, high sugar drinks etc causes you to:
1. Stores more fat; insulin also regulates fat metabolism. We cannot store body fat without it. Think of insulin as a switch. When it’s on, in the few hours after eating, you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat. When it’s off, after the insulin has been depleted, you burn fat as fuel. So when insulin levels are low, you will burn your own fat, but not when they’re high. Eating high-glycemic index foods results in the over production of insulin and reduced fat burning – not good news for people wanting to loose a few kilos of fat!
2. Increases hunger; After a high glycemic index meal, the resulting rush of insulin transports the excess sugar into muscles and the liver as fuel and soon, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. Your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel and in a short time after eating the wrong foods you are hungry again and a craving for more high sugar carbohydrates. Its vicious circle and another situation ripe for obesity.
3. Low energy and poor concentration; Eating too much sugar causes a drop in energy levels because insulin overreacts to the spike in blood sugar, by switching off the burning of fat for fuel, storing sugar in cells, causing a low blood sugar and resulting low energy levels. If your brain is not getting adequate energy from blood sugar its function is diminished.
The gist of the glycemic-index idea is that the longer it takes the carbohydrates to be digested, the lesser the impact on blood sugar and insulin and the healthier the food. Green vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains cause a much slower rise in blood sugar because they have fibre, a non digestible carbohydrate, which slows down digestion and lowers the glycemic index. Protein and fat also slow down the absorption of carbohydrates and produce a satisfying stable blood sugar that will keep you full, thinner and your energy levels up. A high-glycemic index response is a very artificial unnatural state; one that nature never intended you to experience. Its one of the major reasons as to why we are getting fatter, hungrier, tired and are developing many degenerative diseases such as Syndrome X, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
PRACTICLE TIPS FOR A HEALTHY FAT LIFE
Increase your intake of essential omega-3 fats: Their are numerous ways to increase your dietary intake of essential fatty acids by making a mew minor adjustments to the way you prepare food. For example, use flax oil instead of dressing on salads. Eat lots of avocados. Supplement you diet with walnuts, almonds, or flax seeds. Eat cold water fish such as salmon, trout, mackerel which are great sources of the essential fats
How do you know if you are getting enough essential fats? If your skin is soft, smooth, and velvety, you have enough essential fats. If your skin is dry, you need more essential fats. You’ll find in winter, when it’s cold, your skin gets drier than in summer when it’s warm. So in winter you need more essential fats. The reason why you use skin to determine what’s optimum is because your brain, your liver, your heart require the essential fats (they have first priority) – and if they were deprived because the essential fats went to the skin first, then you would have serious health problems. But you can live with dry skin. It’s not beautiful, but you can live with it. So nature’s wisdom says skin gets it last. By the time your skin is soft and velvety, you also know that you have dealt your health issues, because the rest of your body has what it needs.
Beauty and essential fats: There is also a relationship between beauty and essential fatty acids. You cannot separate health, and beauty. Because beauty requires health, and beauty is really the external manifestation of healthy body. It sounds very unromantic, but that’s how it is. When you get the optimum amount of essential fatty acids they form a barrier in the skin against the loss of moisture, and so they are nature’s perfect moisturiser.
The “cellulite” lesson: We all know when we eat too much food our adipose fat cells, swell like balloons. The best example is cottage cheese thighs. The cosmetic industry invented “cellulite” and creams, lotions, machines etc to remove away this special fat. Despite the wide use of the word “cellulite” in woman’s magazines etc it does not exist in science. Don’t waist your money!
Children: From the moment we are born we need fats. Mother’s milk is over 50% fat, much of it saturated fat, it also contains more cholesterol than almost any other food. So make sure your children get enough fat and quality fats. Be aware that we are born with a limited number of fat cells. What happens when we get fat is these cells expand. However unlike adults, children unfortunately have the ability to grow more fat cells so it’s very dangerous to have fat children. Parents have to be very careful over this so as not to predispose their children to obesity in adult life. So the secret is to have the kids eat healthily via lots of meat, fish and vegetables, and limit unnatural high sugar refined products (cola, sweets, modern breakfast cereals etc) enjoy playful exercise and watch less TV and minimise play station time.
Cooking: No frying period. It heats the fat to too high a temperature, causing the production of toxic substances. In addition never cook or heat essential fats or oils. This is dangerous because these oils are extremely heat sensitive and can result in the production of toxic trans fats. Instead use butter or coconut oil when cooking they are more heat stable!
Conclusion
Within a year practically every one of your 100 trillion cells will be renewed. That’s right, more than 98% of all your cells inclusive your organs, muscles, teeth etc are changed every year. Every month you received new skin and cell membranes. Every 3 months you have a totally new blood supply and every 6 months every protein cell in your muscles is renewed. Out with the old and in with the new. There is no getting away from the fact – You are what you eat. A healthy natural diet comes from eating predominantly fresh meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds together with clean water. It is what we are genetically programmed to eat and what makes us healthy. Therefore fat and saturated fat has always been and always will be a healthy part of our diet, without it you couldn’t think, see, reproduce or even move a muscle. How much fat you eat or need for optimum health depends on your unique genes and lifestyle factors such as where you live (cold climates and winter necessitates increase fat intake), exercise and health status. Knowing your metabolic type will give you a great starting point for how much fat to eat. Look at the quality of your skin and listen to your body’s signals, such as were you satisfied after you have eaten to let you know how much fat you should eat. You have to experiment to see what works for you. Some people need more fat than others but in general the low fat concept is wrong for people with northern European genes, still living in our relatively cold climate. Politically Correct Nutrition is based on the assumption that we should reduce our intake of fats, particularly saturated fats from animal sources. Fats from animal sources also contain cholesterol, presented as the twin villain of the civilized diet. We have all warned us about the dangers of saturated fat by Doctors, nutritionists, magazines, newspapers and TV. As a result many people influenced by the antifat movement and fat’s become public enemy number one. However despite hundreds of millions of $, £ and kr spent on experiments it has NOT been shown that eating less fat will make you live longer or that that low-fat diets work! In fact there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health idea has failed the test of time. We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980’s, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma, a decrease in both the percentage of fat in our diet and declining cholesterol levels. In fact the percentage of fat we eat has decreased form 43% to 33%, however the incidence of heart and other degenerative diseases has not declined as would be expected, in fact they are still climbing while our intake of saturated fats influenced by politically correct diet gurus has been steadily decreasing. Something doesn’t add up. Why? Because the public health authorities told us with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free refined carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier, heavier and more likely to suffer degenerative disease. What the government and there experts don’t understand is, with the exception of the deadly trans fats, fat is a natural part of our diet. Anybody interested in there long term health need to understand the difference between good fats and bad fats! Certain essential omega fats are essential for health, we will die without them. Use the recommendations in this article to choose your foods wisely. It’s often hard to get a substantial intake of good fats today because food manufacturers have basically sucked them all out – to improve the shelf-life. Instead they have replaced them with trans fats, just what you want to avoid to stay healthy. Furthermore when they said cut the fat in our diet or we would die all the factories were retooled creating to create low fat or fat free Frankenstein foods filled with harmful chemicals and loads of sugar. If you look at the ingredients of these “foods” you don’t have to be a genius to understand they are not healthy for you! If you think about things logically fat is not ”a greasy killer”, if it was we wouldn’t be here. Like everything else in life, all things being equal, the simplest answer is always the correct one. It’s like finding out that everything you have grown up believing is a lie. Well it has. It’s all been a big fat lie!
Summary – Choose the smart fats
1. Eliminate all trans fats from your diet – if you see the ‘H’ word on the label, get the ‘H’ out of there! 2. Use your skin and body signals after eating as the indicator as to how much fat you need 3. Consider if necessary supplementing your diet with Udo choice or a good quality fish oil pill.
References:
1. Horrobin DF. Essential fatty acids: a review. In Horrobin DE, (ed). Clinical use of essential fatty acids. London: Eden press, 1982 2. Erasmus U. Fats that heal fats that kill, Second edition. Burnaby, BC: Alive books 1993 3. Storlien LH. Et al Science. 1987;237:885 4. Kabara J. Pharmacological effects of lipids, Volume 1, 2, and 3. Champion IL: AOCS, 1989. 5. Trans Fatty Acids and Coronary Heart Disease, The New England Journal of Medicine — June 24, 1999 — Vol. 340, No. 25. 6. ASCN/AIN Task force on trans fatty acids. “Position paper on trans fatty acids.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 63:663-670,1996 7. http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny2.html 8. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition September 2004 80(3):550-559
