Low fat diets are not healthy and they don’t work!
Are you still stuck on the low fat mantra of the last two decades? Think you can’t eat a lot of fat if you’re trying to lose weight? These ideas are still so prevalent in our media and in the low-fat products you see everywhere that it’s no wonder you still believe this. In fact, even many doctors still believe this.
However, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, in 1999-2000, approximately 64 percent of adults in the United States were overweight or obese. That’s almost two-thirds of the adult population, and one-third of our children are now overweight, too. In the last 30 years, the number of overweight children has doubled. In the last decade alone, the number of obese people in the US has increased two and a half times.
Increases obesity, but decreases the percentage of fat in diets
Fifty years ago, only a small percentage of the population had problems with their weight. Now it’s an epidemic! All of this has happened while we’ve cut from 40 to around 32 percent fat as a percentage of our diet. Hmm, maybe a low fat diet is not what we need to lose weight!
unhealthy low fat diets
Low-fat diets not only don’t work, they are low in vitamins A and D, unhealthy, unnatural, and tend to promote weight gain! Research confirms this claim. The famous Framingham study that began in 1948 is still ongoing and shows that the more saturated fat, calories, and cholesterol a person eats, the lower their serum cholesterol! The results also show that the more fat they ate, the less they weighed! Also, fats, including saturated fats, are essential for good health. Fat-soluble vitamins A and D are found in large amounts only in foods that contain saturated fat such as egg yolks, butter, cream, whole milk, and liver. Minerals also need fats and fat-soluble vitamin A to be properly absorbed and used by the body. Calcium needs the fat-soluble vitamin D to be used properly by the body. So we are eating less fat as a nation and consuming much less fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D, but we are gaining weight.
Less fat, more MSG
Perhaps another reason why low-fat diets don’t work is that because fatty foods give them so much flavor, when manufacturers remove fat, they add sugar, MSG, and other chemicals to foods to enhance flavor. All of this can have adverse effects on both our weight and our health. Many researchers believe that it is instead the addition of large amounts of sugar to our diets that is causing our weight gain. Also, MSG has weight gain properties. MSG is fed to laboratory animals to fatten them up for experiments using obese rats, so it’s no surprise that when we eat a lot of MSG, we gain weight. Be careful, MSG does not have to be labeled as MSG to be in your food. In fact, it is used in many, perhaps even most, of our packaged and restaurant foods today, especially fast foods.
So, in conclusion, eating a low-fat diet will not help you lose weight, in fact, it can increase your weight gain, so start looking for healthy types of fats to eat in your diet. Don’t forget to include some of the saturated fats that contain vitamins A and D, as long as you look for meats and dairy products from pastured animals eating their natural diets. One resource for pastured animal products is www.eatwild.com