Weight Loss and the Food We Eat, Part 2
By Toby Helmstetter, LAc
When it comes to losing weight, it seems almost ridiculous to think we should eat more fat. We’ve all heard the mantra “calories in versus calories out” and were taught that a low-fat, low-calorie diet coupled with rigorous daily exercise is the correct formula for dropping excess pounds. But there is new evidence—which turns out isn’t so new—that this age-old idea might not be the truth. In fact, it appears that we have been doing precisely the opposite of what we need to do to lose weight.
Were you able to listen to episode 823 of The People’s Pharmacy? In last month’s newsletter, I posted the link so we could all have the background information for this discussion. If you missed it, here’s the link again: www.peoplespharmacy.com Here’s the basic gist of it: It turns out that a low-fat, low-calorie diet is not only the wrong way to go when we want to lose weight, it’s also unsustainable and may not actually be as good for us as we’ve been taught. Science writer Gary Taubes has written a book, “Why We Get Fat and What to do About It” that chronicles the history of the conventional wisdom around dieting and challenges it. He’s examined countless studies, articles and historical literature in an effort to discern whether the “calories in versus calories out” notion is helpful for losing weight and whether things like dietary fat and salt are actually as bad for us as we’ve been taught. Needless to say, it’s a controversial subject; simply because no one wants to know that what our doctors, the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization have been telling us might be, well, wrong. But that is precisely what Mr. Taubes is out to prove.
I’ve listened to the podcast of the Gradens’ interview with Gary Taubes a few times now. I found it very exciting for several reasons and I’ve chosen 2 particular issues from the interview for our discussion. These are issues I find myself discussing frequently in the clinic, especially when it comes to the topic of food, health and weight loss.
1. Dietary Fat is Good
When you listen to the interview, one of the most striking things is how Taubes discovered that there is very little evidence to support the claim that dietary fat is unhealthy. He speaks specifically about a study funded by the American Heart Association where subjects were placed on either an Atkins-type diet or the American Heart Association’s recommended diet to prevent heart disease—mainly a low-fat, high carbohydrate, restricted calorie diet. The objective was to prove that the Atkins diet increased the subjects’ risk factors for heart disease. Instead, not only were the subjects on the Atkins diet losing more weight (even though they were eating as much food as they wanted, without the carbs) their heart disease risk factors were decreasing while the control groups’ risk factors were going up. In effect, the AHA ended the study because it wasn’t giving the results they’d hoped it would prove. Taubes mentions that there are dozens of other studies with similar outcomes.
We still want to stay away from hydrogenated fats, that we all know for certain. But saturated fats, which have been given a bad rap, aren’t bad for us like we’ve been taught. The fat around the heart muscle is itself highly saturated. We’ll save a discussion on the different types of fat for another time (or you can check out two books by author Sally Fallon: “Eat Fat, Lose Fat” or the cook book “Nourishing Traditions” to learn more on your own), but some of the important functions of fats in the body are: they help calcium’s absorption into the bones, they lower substances in the blood that make us prone to heart disease, they protect the liver from toxins, they help cell membrane integrity, and they benefit the immune system, especially protecting against harmful microorganisms in the digestive tract.
The next topic explains how eating more eggs, butter, whole fat cheeses, milk and yogurt, red meat, the skin on the chicken breast and even more bacon helps us lose weight, as long as we restrict the carbohydrates we consume along with them.
2. Refined Carbs Make Us Fat
Taubes speaks frequently about the “refined, easily digestible carbohydrates” that need to be eliminated from the diet if we are trying to lose weight. But what exactly are these carbs and why get rid of them if we’re trying to lose weight? He’s speaking specifically about bread, pasta, white rice, crackers, sugar, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, potatoes and fruit. The problem with these foods is that they disrupt our blood sugar; when eaten, they cause an increase in blood sugar, and the body in response secretes insulin and other hormones to try to bring the blood sugar levels down to a manageable level. Repeating this process several times throughout the day—a soda here, a piece of fruit there, a sandwich and chips at lunch and pasta for dinner—over time sets the stage for many different kinds of health conditions, obesity being one of them but also degenerative diseases, type II diabetes or insulin resistance, depression, anxiety, PMS and more.
And here is the low-down on how we get fat from eating carbs: Say for lunch we have a turkey sandwich. The body uses the carbohydrates from the lunch—namely the bread—as fuel for the next few hours (if we’re lucky to get that many hours out of a couple pieces of bread), and it stores the fat from the turkey, cheese and mayo on the sandwich in the body as fat. What we’re doing to ourselves is running on carbs—a quick and short-lived source of energy because they are converted to sugar in our bodies—and storing everything else as fat, and that’s how we gain weight. Without the carbs, what we do instead is use the fat we eat for energy, which is a much longer-lasting, sustainable source to run on. Thus we eliminate the radical shifts in blood sugar and burn the fat we eat rather than store it in our tissues.
The fear in making the shift to this kind of diet (and in effect, a sort of life-style change) is that our cholesterol is going to go up. In fact, quite the opposite is true. There are numerous studies that show how sugar and refined carbohydrates are actually the culprit in increasing our risk of heart disease and high cholesterol. Taubes mentions this in his interview, too: we can eat as much fat as we want in the absence of refined carbohydrates and sugar and not endanger our cholesterol. Why? Because it’s actually sugar that causes the rise in blood cholesterol, triglycerides, and increased adhesiveness of blood platelets. Again, this is a whole other topic in itself, but if you’re interested you can get the book “The Cholesterol Myths” to learn more.
I think the final question this interview raises is: why hasn’t anyone told us any of this before?! It’s a valid question. Why have we all been walking around feeling guilty every time we try to lose weight because we’re afraid we’re eating too much or not exercising enough? I won’t attempt to answer this question—it’s as vitriolic an issue as religion or the environment—but instead hope that this article will inspire you to explore new ways of feeding yourselves and your families, ways that promote lasting health.