Are
you still caught up in the low-fat mantra of
the past couple decades? Do you think you can’t eat much fat if you are trying to lose
weight? These ideas are still so prevalent in our media and in the
low-fat products you see everywhere, in the grocery stores and in
restaurants, that it’s no wonder that many believe this. In
fact, even many doctors still believe this,
and will prescribe low fat diets for their obese or overweight patients.
2/3
of American Adults and 1/3 of Children Overweight Today
However,
according to the U.S. Center for Disease Controli,
in 1999-2000, an estimated 64 percent of adults
in the United States were either obese or overweight.
That’s
almost 2/3 of the adult population, and 1/3
of our children are now overweight as well,
and these figures are increasing. In the past
30 years, the number of overweight children
has doubled. In just the past decade, the number
of obese people in the U.S. has gone up 2 ½ times.ii
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Fifty
years ago, only a small percentage of the population
had problems with their weight. Now it’s an epidemic! All
this has happened while we cut back from 40% to around 32% fat as
a percentage of our diet. Even people in other countries are becoming
increasingly overweight, and this has happened as they are adopting
the Standard American Diet (SAD) of processed, high sugar fare.
That sure is sad.
Low
Fat Diets Actually Promote Weight Gain
Low-Fat diets not only don’t
work, but they’re not healthy, not natural,
and they tend to promote weight gain! Research confirms
this statement. The famous Framingham Study that started in 1948
is still going on, and it shows that the more saturated fat, the
more calories, and the more cholesterol a person ate, the lower
their serum cholesterol! The results also show that the more fat
they ate, the less they weighed! This might be amazing to you,
but you might want to try it!
We
Eat Less Fat, But Are Gaining Weight
So,
we are eating less fat as a nation, but are gaining weight. There
are a number of reasons for this. One is that since fat gives foods
much of their flavor, when manufacturers cut out the fat, they add
sugar, MSG and other chemicals to the food to enhance the taste.
These can all have adverse effects on both our weight and our health.
In fact, MSG promotes weight gain so much that researchers feed
MSG to rats when they need obese rats for a study. Another is that
it is hard to overeat when your meal contains a healthy serving
of fat, since the fats provide a level of satiety or fullness that
you just cannot get when eating a meal that is low in fats. You
still need to be very careful, however, about which fats you include
in your diet.
More on Saturated
Fats and How They
are Actually Necessary for Good Health...
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