Low fat diets are unhealthy and they don’t work!

Still stuck with 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 Center for Disease Control, in 1999-2000, approximately 64 percent of adults in the United States were overweight or obese. That’s nearly 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 reducing from 40 to about 32 percent fat as a percentage of our diet. Hmm, maybe a low-fat diet isn’t what we need to lose weight!

Unhealthy low fat diets

Low-fat diets not only don’t work, they’re 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 going on, showing that the more saturated fat, calories, and cholesterol a person eats, the lower their serum cholesterol will be! 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 high amounts only in foods that contain saturated fat such as egg yolks, butter, cream, whole milk, and liver. Minerals also need fat and fat-soluble vitamin A to be properly absorbed and used by the body. Calcium needs fat-soluble vitamin D to be used properly by the body. So we’re eating less fat as a nation and consuming far fewer fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D, but we’re gaining weight.

Less fat, more MSG

Perhaps another reason low-fat diets don’t work is that, since fatty foods give off so much of their flavor, when manufacturers cut out the fat, they add sugar, monosodium glutamate, and other chemicals to foods to improve taste. All of this can have adverse effects on both our weight and our health. Many researchers believe that it is the addition of large amounts of sugar to our diets that is causing our weight gain instead. Also, MSG has weight gaining properties. MSG is fed to lab animals to fatten them up for experiments that require obese rats, so it’s no surprise that when we eat a lot of MSG, we gain weight. Be careful, MSG doesn’t have to be labeled MSG to be in your food. In fact, it’s used in many, perhaps even most, of our restaurant and packaged foods today, especially fast foods.

So, in conclusion, eating a low-fat diet won’t 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 vitamins A and D contain, as long as you look for grass-fed meats and dairy products that are out on the pasture eating their natural diets. A resource for grass-fed animal products is www.eatwild.com