Healthy Living Principle #5: Eat More Fat

Welcome back to my Principles of Health Series, to refresh yourself on numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 check the linked blog posts.  Today we're talking fat and it's importance in your diet.  Newsflash - Fat doesn't make you FAT, it's not 'artery clogging,' and it won't raise your cholesterol.  

So where did the idea that Fat makes you FAT come about?  In summary it started in the 1960s with a study by Ancel Keys called "The Seven Countries Study" in short he had some good science but no convincing results, so he selected data that support his hypothesis that eating fat makes you fat and the myth was born.  The study was sponsored by the US government and adopted into food policy and eventually the food pyramid.  From here the fear of fat was born, and along with that fear, a food industry focused on removing fat from its food source and creating low fat versions of common foods and even working to create new fats to replace the horrible 'saturated' fat that was thought to clog arteries and lead to heart disease. 

Now if you're not supposed to be afraid of fat anymore, what types of fat should you focus on adding back into your diet, and why?

What types of fat should I eat?

Paleo in US News Report

Ok I'm a little late to the table on this, but I still wanted to share some of my thoughts.  US News released a report ranking the Best Overall Diets and the good news is that the Paleo diet is included on the list.  The bad news is that it's last...my blink reaction to the list is that I want to see the ranking criteria.  Any study or report that includes the Slim Fast Diet and Medi Fast Diet (which feature consuming fortified supplements instead of eating actual food) on the list of the best diets automatically raises a flag for me. 

The Top 20 Best Diets....according to US News:
1. DASH Diet
2. Mediterranean Diet
2. TLC Diet
2. Weight Watchers Diet
5. Mayo Clinic Diet
5. Volumetric Diet
7. Jenny Craig Diet
8. Ornish Diet
9. Vegetarian Diet
10. Slim Fast Diet
11. Nutrisystem Diet
12. Vegan Diet
13. South Beach Diet
14. Eco Atkins Diet
14. Zone Diet
16. Glycemic-Index Diet
16. Medifast Diet
18. Raw Foods Diet
19. Atkins Diet
20. Paleo Diet

Fructose, the not so innocent sugar

I've talked previously on the blog about sugar and how your body processes it.  Now I want to cover why Fructose, a specific type of sugar is particularly bad for you.  This all stems from the principal that all calories are not created equal when we are trying to fuel our body.  If you already subscribe to a Paleo/Primal lifesyle this concept probably makes sense to you.  If not you may assume that the key to weight loss and overall health related to Calories In - Calories Out , if you take in more calories than you burn you get fat, if you take in less calories or burn more calories than you take in, you lose fat.  A few "experts" on the all calories are not created equal subject are Gary Taubes who wrote "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and just released a new book which is a sequel to Good Calories, Bad Calories that is more digestible "Why we get Fat, and what to do about it" along with Dr. Robert Lustig whose lecture, Sugar: The Bitter Truth which was published on YouTube made a huge splash.

So losing fat isn't as easy as calories in being lower than calories out.  You need to take a look at what you're eating as well as how much.  As a nation Americans are getting fatter - on average we Americans weigh 25 more pounds than we did 25 years ago (~1985).  How are we gaining all this extra weight, beacause we're eating more and too much of the wrong stuff.  And the reason why we are eating more than we need, its because we are increastingly Leptin resistant. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain that you are full and you don't need anymore food to fuel your body. When you are Leptin resistant, that means that your brain doesn't respond as well to the leptin signals, meaning that even though you have enough food for fuel your brain doesn't register that I'm full signal and you still feel hungry, so you eat more than you need. What causes the letpin resistance in your body - one thing is the processing of fructose in the liver. If you look at what the extra calories are in today's diet, it is generally in the form of added carbohydrates.  In the 1990s when the nation started following the high carbohydrate and low fat diet have essentially doomed ourselves to a diet that will make us fat through the increase in carbohydrates in our diets.

   Did you know that 1 soda a day (additional 150 calories) is an additoinal 15 pounds of fat per year that is added to your body.

Americans today eat/consume a whopping 141 pounds of sugar per year!

Eating fat doesn't make you FAT

Contrary to popular belief, eating fat doesn't make you fat.  The current nutritional buzz is focused on eating low fat foods, for every full fat food there seems to be a reduced fat, low fat, or fat free version of the same thing.  As a nation we are afraid of fat, yet still have sky high obesity and diabetes levels.  What if eating fat doesn't actually make you fat...

Now for a little science - you need a little science to back things like this up! Many clinical studies have been run trying to prove the fat-lipid hypothesis, which basically states that eating fat (particularly saturated fat) makes you fat, and eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol and both lead to heart disease and obesity.  Nutritional studies are difficult to implement because there are so many variables; however, time after time the fat-lipid hypothesis has been tested and has failed to show a correlation between eating fat and blood serum cholesterol levels and obesity rates.  The notion that eating fat makes you fat and eating foods that contain high cholesterol make your cholesterol rise seems to make sense, so when Americans were contracting heart disease at alarming rates in the 1940s and 1950s the Federal Government decided that they needed to do something for the greater good of the American population.  This resulted in the birth of the USDA Food Pyramid and nutrition guidelines.  The trouble is that through conjecture, they defined the rules of the USDA Food Pyramid and began to stress a low fat diet without determining that a low fat diet could actually solve the heart disease issues. 

It's all in the hormones...