It sounds strange, but could your diet actually be fat-deficient?
We’ve all grown up in a world where dietary fat is the enemy to our
health. It’s “common knowledge” that to lose weight and to be healthy,
you must reduce the amount of fat you are consuming in your diet leading
people to make it their default plan a low-fat, low-calorie diet.
But walk with me for a moment to explore the unintended consequences
that popular meme that almost everyone believes to be true has had on
the people who have faithfully followed it.
When you significantly reduce or cut dietary fat out of your diet, what
happens as a result?
You get hungry, feel cranky, experience brain fog, have intense cravings
for carbohydrates, lack energy, and have an overall feeling that
something important is missing. And it is!
Fat – especially saturated fat – has been so viciously vilified by our
modern-day culture. However, when it comes to dramatically enhancing
your quality of life by way of some pretty incredible metabolic
improvements, fat is where it’s at. Did you know dietary fat could
IMPROVE your health? Probably not with all the weeping and gnashing of
teeth that’s been put out there about it for most of our lives.
Let’s take a brief look at just a few of the benefits that you’ll get
from adding in MORE saturated and monounsaturated fats to your diet
rather than taking them away:
– Totally zaps those intense carb cravings
– Enables you to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E & K
– Raises your HDL “good” cholesterol the best
– Stokes the fat-burning flame to access stored body fat
– Hunger control that enables you to go many hours between meals
– Improved mood and general sense of well-being
– Sharper mind and increased mental acuity
– More energy than you have ever experienced before
– Delicious food that makes you feel good eating it
I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Fat is a pretty
important part of our diet. So why do we think we have to cut it down in
order to be healthy?
The story has been told many times before in great books like the
classic Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes and the 2014 New York
Times bestselling release The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, but it
goes back to the theory promulgated by a scientist in the 1950′s named
Ancel Keys who published a highly-flawed Seven Countries Study that
concluded eating real food-based fats like butter, meats and full-fat
dairy will increase your cholesterol levels which is a risk factor
leading to heart disease and death. We explained in our 2013 book
Cholesterol Clarity why this may not be the case if you are interested
in learning more about this subject.
Unfortunately, that’s where the genesis of fat-phobia began, but it
didn’t stop there. In the 1970′s, the fear of consuming fat reached a
fevered pitch amongst our politicians, especially Sen. George McGovern,
who felt compelled to push a nutritional agenda that was decidedly
anti-fat on the American people. That’s when we got the Dietary
Guidelines for Americans beginning in 1980 and the subsequent Food
Pyramid–now referred to as MyPlate that is still based on these low-fat
principles in 2014.
Can you believe how deeply entrenched the low-fat dogma has become based
on just one study by a scientist from a half century ago that left out
important data that countered the very position he promoted as absolute
fact? And yet that’s where we are in society today.
If you listen to dietitians and other health gurus in the media, they’ll
scream from the rooftops that we are all on fat overload. They put this
idea out there that it’s the fat in our diet that is making us fat and
diseased. I’m always amused when I see the list of “fatty” foods shared
in health columns by these so-called health “experts” and they talk
about foods such as donuts, French fries, milkshakes, potato chips,
pizza, and more.
Ummm, does anybody else see what’s wrong with that list of fat-based
foods? That’s right, they’re all mostly carbohydrate-based ones
primarily. And the kind of fat they are putting in these processed
carbage food-like products are inferior omega-6-rich vegetable oil fats
like soybean oil, cottonseed oil, and canola oil that are highly
inflammatory in the body. Ironically, these manmade, highly-processed
seed oils are the very fats that are promoted by health experts as the
better alternative to saturated fats. What’s wrong with this picture?
I think we’ve been bamboozled for long enough and it’s high time we give
real food-based saturated and monounsaturated fats the credence they
deserve in our diet again. In fact, because of our faithfulness to
reducing the amount of fat we eat in our diet, I think we are actually a
fat-deficient society, not one that is on fat-overload. That would be
blasphemy to say to most registered dietitians, medical doctors, and
other health leaders who have been trained to believe that fat is an
enemy. But fat is your friend and you should start spending more quality
time with this friend to enhance your health.
Can you imagine what would happen if people started eating more butter,
coconut oil, avocados, fatty meats, high-fat dairy and more along with a
reduction in their carbohydrate intake? The vast improvements in
virtually every aspect of health–mental and physical–would not unnoticed
and the changes for the better would happen quickly. We would be so much
better off than we are today. But do we have the will to go against
everything we’ve always been taught about the role of dietary fat in our
health? Only time will tell.
It’s time for me to go add some grass-fed butter to my next meal. Care
to join me?
Jimmy Moore, Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb blog and podcast
http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.
http://www.
Keto Clarity (2014 – Victory Belt Publishing):
http://tinyurl.com/KetoClarity
Cholesterol Clarity (2013 – Victory Belt Publishing):
http://tinyurl.com/
