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

Still stuck in the low-fat mantra of the past two decades? Think you can’t eat a lot of 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 that it’s no wonder you can still believe it. In fact, even many doctors still believe it.

However, according to the US Center for Disease Control, in 1999-2000, an estimated 64 percent of adults in the United States were obese or overweight. 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 multiplied by two and a half.

Obesity increases, but the percentage of fat in diets decreases

Fifty years ago, only a small percentage of the population had weight problems. Now it is an epidemic! All of this has happened while reducing 40 to 32 percent of 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

Not only do low-fat diets not work, but they are low in vitamins A and D, are unhealthy, unnatural, and tend to promote weight gain. Research confirms this claim. The famous Framingham Study that began in 1948 is still going on and shows that the more saturated fat, the more calories and the more cholesterol a person ate, the lower the serum cholesterol! The results also show that the more fat they ate, the less they weighed! Also, fats, including saturated ones, 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 fat and fat-soluble vitamin A for the body to absorb and use properly. Calcium needs fat-soluble vitamin D for the body to use it properly. So we are eating less fat as a nation and getting a lot less fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D, but we are gaining weight.

Less fat, more monosodium glutamate

Perhaps another reason that low-fat diets don’t work is that since fat gives food so much of its flavor, when manufacturers remove fat, they add sugar, MSG, and other chemicals to food to enhance the flavor. All of these can have adverse effects on both our weight and our health. Instead, many researchers believe that it is the addition of large amounts of sugar to our diet that is causing our weight gain. Additionally, MSG has weight-gaining properties. Monosodium glutamate is fed to laboratory animals in order to fatten them up for experiments that require obese rats, so it’s no wonder 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 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 may well increase your weight gain, so start looking for healthy types of fats to consume in your diet. Be sure to include some of the saturated fats that contain vitamins A and D, whenever you are looking for meat and dairy products from grass-fed animals that are on the grass eating their natural diets. A resource for grass-fed animal products is www.eatwild.com

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