#336
Last week, while thumbing through the pages of a journal for physicians, I came across this headline: “Very-Low-Fat Diets are Superior to Low-Carbohydrate Diets.”
For 15 years now, I’ve warned about the risks of low-fat diets. My files are full of patients who lost fat – and kept it off – by eating more of the right kind of fat.
In today’s Health Alert, we’ll look at how this myth continues and why these well-intentioned diets put you at risk at unnatural and unnecessary risks.
Don’t Mistake Popular for Proven
Americans have been wrapped up in a low-fat craze for nearly fifty years. In that time, we’ve ascended the fat folks’ Who’s Who to become the fattest nation on earth. Meanwhile, heart disease has skyrocketed and maturity diabetes is up over 900%.
This of course doesn’t prove cause and effect. But let’s at least put it in the proper context with this little-appreciated fact: Fat intake in modern America at 35% is lower than the 38% hunter-gatherer diet that we all ate for over 99% of the total time of human existence. Therefore, artificially lowering your fat intake only takes you further from your natural diet.
In this particular article, the author goes to great lengths to convince the reader that advocates of low-carb diets are corrupt. He implies that any doctor recommending this diet must only be trying to milk money from an unsuspecting public.
He offers little in the way of evidence. He references various studies, but he never bothers to give specific results. For instance, in the opening paragraph, he claims that a leading study found that a low-carb diet promotes heart, kidney, liver disease and cancer.[1]
Yet when I actually looked up the study cited there was no evidence for any of these “risks”, whatsoever.[2]
If you’re looking for real results of scientific studies, the University of Cincinnati followed low-carb dieters who were allowed to eat as much food as they wanted. They compared them to low-fat dieters who were limited to small amounts of low-fat food.[3] Despite this bias in favor of the low-fat group, the low-carb group still lost more weight and more body fat.
The Health Risks of a Low-Fat Diet
Another study from the University of Buffalo shows that people who eat more fat reduce their risk of heart disease by 15%.[4] And, the people eating a low-fat diet saw their good cholesterol (HDL) drop and their triglycerides (blood fat) go up.
The reason? If you’re a regular reader of Health Alerts, you’ll remember that insulin controls fat production and storage. When you eat foods that spike your blood sugar, a wave of insulin floods your body. Insulin then in turn triggers your liver to produce more triglycerides and body fat. When this happens repeatedly, your body gets stuck on a program of making and storing fat. How much insulin do you secrete in response to fat in the diet? Zero. Carbs trigger insulin.
They just don’t seem to get it. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Yet you have to be wary of modern fats for other reasons. These include adulterated polluted fat from the modern animal husbandry industry, man-made vegetable fats and especially trans-fats, which you should completely.
If you eat out of boxes and plastic bags, the label “low-fat” will not protect you. Remember that sugar and other fattening additives replace the flavor of the missing fat.
Stick to naturally occurring whole foods and choose animal products only from animals still living on their native diets and these problems with fat and carbs solve themselves.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
[1] Kirschenbaum D. Very-low-fat diets are superior to low-carbohydrate diets. Patient Care. Nov 2005. pp. 47-55.
[2] Bravata DM, et al. Efficacy and safety of low-carbohydrate diets: a systematic review. JAMA. 2003 Apr 9;289(14):1837-50.
[3] Bonnie J. A randomized trial comparing a very low carbohydrate diet and a calorie restricted low fat diet. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2003 Vol. 88, No. 4 1617-1623.
[4] News Release. Moderate-Fat Diet is Kinder to Heart than Low-Fat Diet. University of Buffalo. Jan 30, 2004.