Yes – You read this right!
A diet higher in saturated fats like red meat, eggs and butter while decreasing whole grain carbohydrates not only produces greater weight loss.
It improves your overall health by decreasing your risk for diabetes while improving heart health.
Now, if you are like me. You may be thinking……
“Ya Right! What is this a joke. Everyone knows saturated fats are the dietary equivalent of satan himself.”
Right?
Wrong!
Heart healthy saturated fats, not complex carbohydrates
To fully appreciate this statement – You have to realize I graduated college as a nutrition science major in the mid-1990’s at the height of “heart healthy complex carbohydrates”
And having worked within the medically supervised weight loss community for the past two decades. I am reminded daily just how ingrained the low fat, high complex carbohydrate diet is within modern health care.
So, you can appreciate my initial skepticism when I came across the “Dietary Fats Produce Healthy Weight Loss” in medical research nearly a decade ago.
Advancements in medical research prove the establishment wrong —
“Dietary fats are not the main cause of weight gain, diabetes, elevated cholesterol and heart disease”
Over the past 50 years, advancements in research and imaging technologies including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and X-Ray Crystallography have provided researchers the tools needed to essentially peer inside your body and see how individual molecules react with cells.
This drastically improves researcher’s ability to determine how your body produces molecules such as cholesterol and the way these molecules function within your body.
These technologies provide definitive data on how cholesterol interacts with the arteries of your heart versus relying on large scale statistical analysis. Better known as epidemiological studies.
A study published in the Journal of American Nutrition in 2010, analyzed the findings of 21 of these epidemiological studies taking place over the past four decades.
The results from analyzing all these previous statistical studies showed no relationship between saturated fat intake and coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and cardiovascular disease (CVD). The conclusion of this study:
“There is insufficient evidence from prospective of the past epidemiologic studies to conclude that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD, stroke, or CVD.”
Elevated blood cholesterol is not the main player in heart disease
One benefit from the “cut the fat” movement has been all the data collected from scientific research involving cholesterol.
Using the technologies previously discussed (MRI and NMR), scientists have been able to identify cholesterol as an innocent bystander in heart disease.
The real culprits are the protein carrier units (HDL, LDL, and Small Dense LDL) necessary to transport cholesterol throughout your body.
As cholesterol and blood are like oil and water. They do not mix.
When these protein carrier units become damaged, typically through elevated blood sugar, they stick to the lining of your arteries triggering an immune response known as Inflammation.
Researchers have identified, it is these damaged proteins (caused by excessive carbohydrates) and your bodies response to eliminate them, chronic low level inflammation, that are the main culprits responsible for heart disease.
Dietary fat and cholesterol consumption play a small role in blood cholesterol levels
This same research has identified blood cholesterol levels are controlled largely by genetics as opposed to dietary intake of fats and cholesterol.
This occurs in your liver through the enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase which makes most blood cholesterol. When you ingest fats or cholesterol within your diet, your body simply tells this enzyme to make less cholesterol and conversely when you lower your dietary intake of fats and cholesterol your body makes more cholesterol.
This fact lead the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to recommend the USDA remove the 50 year old requirement mandating food manufactures warn consumers of how much cholesterol is in the foods they are purchasing.
Health care operates by having medical insurance companies pay doctors and hospitals to perform procedures and write prescriptions
I Get it
The first time you come across this information. It can be overwhelming.
Especially considering the daily indoctrination from food manufacturers, the pharmaceutical industry and perhaps even your own doctor.
All proclaiming the benefits of “Heart Healthy Whole Grains” while continuing to demonize dietary fats despite all the mounting scientific evidence.
Unfortunately, this advice is dead wrong.
One thing you must realize is modern health care is a business and it doesn’t pay doctors and hospitals to educate you on how to achieve healthy weight loss through diet and nutrition.
Especially when this advice negatively impacts performing procedures and writing prescriptions creating massive profits. Chief among them being treatments for diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
A diet high in fats has been proven to produce healthy weight loss.
With the benefit of time and the ability see how individual molecules act inside your body.
Researchers have clearly shown a diet including red meat, butter and eggs, but low in carbohydrates helps….
- Producing greater weight loss over a high complex carbohydrate, low fat diet
- Decreases your risk for developing diabetes by lowering your blood sugar
- Improves your heart health by reducing both inflammation and the small dense protein carrier molecules that are commonly associated with heart disease.
This dietary truth was captured succinctly by the Chairman of Harvard University’s School of Public Health.
Dr. Walter Willet, MD in his book “Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.”
“Since the 1970’s, as the data started coming in, we just did not find any higher risk of breast cancer among women who consume more fat in the diet. And the same was true for colon cancer and for heart attacks and risk of type 2 diabetes. In fact, the percentage of calories from fat in a diet has not been related to any important health outcome.”
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