low fat falls flat

One of my biggest pet pieves in the world of nutrition is the notion that low fat diets are the healthiest diet. Nothing could be further from the truth. On one hand nutrition professionals promote the benefits of a whole food diet, yet they encourage throwing out the yolk of your eggs and using only low-fat dairy. I’m sorry, but how are egg whites and skimmed milk considered whole food? Whole foods come with fat for a reason.

When we consume fat, our bodies sense that our food supply is safe and secure. When we don’t eat enough fat, our body becomes preoccupied with how to get it. Ever wonder why most low-fat diets fail? Our bodies are hard-wired to seek out fat – and at some point our innate biology kicks in and we “cheat” or binge. Then, you feel like you’ve failed! You’re not alone. I, too, consumed a low-fat diet for years beacuse that’s what I had been told was healthy, and once I experimented with eating more fat, my food cravings went away, my energy was more sustained, and I got my health back. So, if you’ve been duped into eating a low-fat diet, consider the following:

• Fat tastes good first of all. Is it a crime to enjoy our food?
• Fat keeps us full. Ever wonder why you get hunger pangs just an hour after breakfast of lowfat cereal and skim milk?
• Fat helps us absorb fat soluble vitamins (that’s vitamins A, D, E, and K) and provides’bonus nutrients’ like CLA, which has been shown to reduce body fat.
• Fat does not affect our blood sugar. That’s important because any time our blood sugar goes up (from eating carbs and sugar) our insulin levels also go up. Insulin tells our body to store excess blood sugar as body fat. So, eating fat literally helps prevent gaining fat.
• Fat keeps your skin glowing. Yes, eating fat is like putting lotion on from the inside out (especially the omega-3s).
• Fat makes up 65% of our nervous system. That’s why fat is so critical to the brain development of babies.
• Fat is the building block of hormones – yep, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and others are all made from the stuff.

Now, please do not take this to mean that I endorse fried foods. Yes, the kind of fat that you put in your body matters, but it’s not as simple as ‘unsaturated fat is good, saturated fat is bad’. (Actually, more and more I see it the other way). See future posts for more on this…

And finally, if you need yet another excuse to eat your butter (and not feel guilty about it), I’ll leave you with a quote from Walter Willet, a noted nutrition researcher who has focused on fat for many decades.

…within the United States, a substantial decline in the percentage of energy from fat consumed during the past two decades has corresponded with a massive increase in obesity. Diets high in fat do not appear to be the primary cause of the high prevalence of excess body fat in our society, and reductions in fat will not be a solution.

– WC Willett . American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 67, 556S-562S, Copyright © 1998 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc.

Amen.