8 Health-Destroying Lies About Fat

For many years now, we as a society have been told to stay away from saturated fats and work hard to lower our cholesterol.  Since Western style disease prevention and nutrition are fairly rife with misinformation, possibly propagated by Big Pharma, is it any wonder that we’ve been spoon fed outright lies about the foods we eat as well as how we build our diets?

Let’s talk about the 8 biggest lies about fat foisted off on us by “those who know”.  And they are real eye-openers…

1. Low fat, high carb is the best diet for humans.

Sure, forty or fifty years ago, those in the health care fields believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that saturated fat would cause heart disease.  After a while, it was low-fat everything, added to the already chemical-laden processed offerings on the grocery store shelves.  In fact, in 1977, the USDA food pyramid showed us this diet as what we should all be following, feeding our children, etc.  As a result, all these years later, obesity in this country is epidemic.

You’re probably wondering how this diet could have caused this.  Well, here’s the deal…people stopped eating the healthier, whole foods like meat, butter and eggs and opted for highly processed foods, like butter substitutes and foods off the charts full of processed and refined sugars and carbs.

Several significant studies have examined the low fat diet craze over a period of many years. The Women’s Health Initiative conducted a study of nearly 50,000 women, in two separate groups.  One group ate what they normally ate and the other group consumed the “low fat diet”.

After seven years of this study – seven years! – the group consuming the low fat diet weighed in at only one pound, on the average, less than the control group.  No differences in likelihood for heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure or diabetes were found.  In fact, this, as well as other large studies, found no advantage whatsoever to subscribing to a low fat diet.

There is no evidence that eating a low fat diet will bring you any benefits.  They do not promote long term weight loss nor do they help anyone dodge the bullet of chronic disease.

2. Eggs are bad for you. 

We’re all logical thinking people.  How is it that a self-contained food, like an egg, in possession of enough nutrient density to take a single cell and grow it into a chicken, be bad for us?

It is true that eggs contain cholesterol and not in small quantities.  Science has proven that eggs do not contribute heart disease or to the rise of bad cholesterol in the bloodstream.  Eggs actually elevate the good cholesterol levels in the blood.  Eggs are, in reality, an extremely healthy food, packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins that are vital to many healthy body systems.

3. Contemporary health care professionals have focused on their belief that total cholesterol levels are the prime indicators of impending heart disease or attack. 

While there is truth in the concept that it is tied to an elevated risk, the situation is significantly more complex that this blanket statement would have us believe. 

If we’re looking at a high cholesterol number and your good cholesterol levels are high, that’s good.  If your bad cholesterol is high, but the small LDL bits – the bad ones – are low in count, while the large ones are high, that’s also good.  The large LDL particles have been declared “mostly benign”.

In much older persons, higher cholesterol actually lowers the risk of developing heart disease.  In addition, cholesterol that is too low is thought to contribute to other causes of death, such as a variety of types of cancer.

4. Oils from seeds and vegetables are good for you.

Soybean, cottonseed and canola oils are brimming with polyunsaturated Omega 6 fatty acids.  These are harmful if you consume too much of them.  But these oils have been promoted to the status of “healthy choices”, with nearly 5% of the fatty acids they contain being the very bad trans fats!

5. Saturated fat causes heart disease. 

They’ve been telling us for years that this is true.  The incorrect studies conducted years ago have been adopted as government health policy and no changes have occurred with their position in spite of overwhelming proof to the contrary.  The facts are that saturated fats don’t really affect cholesterol all that much and vary significantly from person to person.  The ridiculous campaign of fat disinformation has never, ever been proven to promote the risk factors or to even cause heart disease.

6. Trans and saturated fats are the same. 

They’re not, you know.  Trans fats have been changed chemically.  Horribly altered in fact, utilizing high heat, the introduction of metals and hydrogen.  Yuck.

Health professionals and organizations have consistently grouped saturated and trans fats together and classifying them as “the same”.  Saturated fat is harmless but you sure cannot logically make the same claim with trans fats!

Trans fats contribute to diabetes, insulin resistance, inflame a variety of body systems and raise the risks of other serious diseases.  While awareness has reduced the amounts of trans fats we consume as a society, processed foods are still packed with them.  And even crazier – the FDA still claims them to be “generally safe”.

7. Eating fats make you fat. 

What’s that cliché?  You are what you eat?  Not so.  There are a number of successful studies on the books that prove that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbs will result in more weight loss than a low fat diet.  High fat/low carb diets also increase good cholesterol, lower glucose, stabilize insulin and promote the loss of belly fat.

There are still a significant number of health care and nutrition professional trotting about the countryside, squawking about how low carb diets are bad for us, all the while continuing to promote the low fat failure.

8. If it’s low fat, it’s got to be a healthier option – even if it’s processed.

There are a few problems with low fat foods.  First, they’re expensive.  They’re expensive because of the technology that the processed food manufacturer’s had to develop in order to extract the fats from the food.  The other problem?  Fat tastes good.  The processed food manufacturer’s answer to this was to throw sugar into the low fat foods to make up for the fact that they now tasted terrible.  Low fat foods are packed, just packed, with sugar as well as other nasties like high fructose corn syrup.