News
Top blogs
Podcast
Topics
Events“Fat Is In, Sugar Is Out”
Good fat, good fat, sugar
The paradigm shift continues. More and more experts stop being unnecessarily afraid of fat. More and more people blame the obesity epidemic on junk food, with added sugar and other refined carbohydrates as culprit number one.
Now there are also new rules proposed for nutrition labels in the US. They’ll make it easier to watch out for added sugar:
BBC News: Fat is in, sugar is out: Label creates new food hierarchy
Some people take a detour and blame the obesity epidemic on the fuzzy concept of calories. They are right in theory, but wrong in practice. The quality of the calories determines how many calories one wants to eat.
In the past, before the obesity epidemic, nobody knew what a calorie was. They still kept their weight. Requiring calorie counting to maintain weight falls on its own absurdity. It’s as silly as demanding that you count your breaths.
We have a built-in sense of hunger and satiety that works better than any calorie table. Especially as it’s impossible to know how many calories you consume.
More
The Real Association Between Butter and Heart Disease in Sweden
What Happens If You Eat 5,800 Calories Daily on an LCHF Diet?
The Real Cause of Heart Disease
Why Calorie Counters Are Confused
Heart Doctor: Time to Bust the Myth About Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
26 comments
Top comment
All comments
One even included, in a footnote it must be noted, the shocking phrase
"unhealthy vegetable oils".
The rest of the publications were loaded with the usual whole-grain calorie-counting low-fat nonsense, including exercise-your-buns-off advice complete with unambiguous prominent numbers showing just how ineffective exercise is as a primary weight loss technique.
Just looked, and no. It's the December 2013 edition of the Spark16 healthletter published by Welcoa, and paywalled if available on line at all. Last sentence on (unnumbered) page 6 if you know anyone who gets it.
As with most things change will come into effect from the bottom up... WE the people will do our reading and research and WE the people will turn to sites like this one where we know we are taught good stuff and are supported in our endeavours to become healthy once more :-)
I disagree with Nestle's assumption that "No one is worried about the amount of sugar in fruit or milk". The carb content of every food that I intend to ingest concerns me. Those of us who count grams of carbs daily add them up for every portion of food to be eaten, including milk lactose and fruit fructose... so often that the numbers quickly become memorized as our learning of "new and improved" ways of doing things become habitual.
With regards to calories, I view the 9kcal/g of energy contained in beneficial fats in terms of providing a 2.25 x denser form of power to fuel my physical activity, in preference to the 4kcal/g of energy contained in carbs. Eating carbs as my main source of energy gave me a "puffy" body that needed to eat a greater quantity more often to stay fueled up throughout the day. Eating in this manner was also a time waster I could not afford. Switching to fats as my main source of energy gave me a "dense" body that sustained itself between main meals, with less quantity, no secondary snacking necessary, less time involved in food preparation and eating.
I liken how I sustain my bodily needs to how I would treat a sports motorbike or car... which runs perfectly and consistently on 98 octane petrol (as it should)... but replace this with 91 octane petrol, it runs sluggishly or not at all, causes damage. Same comparision for fats and carbs in my body.
I'm strongly under the impression, that it's not at all the amount of calories that counts, but the source of calories and their signaling to the body what to do with them through hormone action.
I'm not sure if there is almost any action in the body that happens with out this signaling?
I mean if you could eat a diet that would not budge your insulin and other growth factors then there wouldn't be any growth in any tissue no matter how many calories you'd shove down your piehole?
Right?
This being said, your insulin will never be zero. You will still have other hormones also: IGF-1 and IGFBP-3 will remain, but at normal levels, IGF-1 gently stimulating all cells to grow and IGFBP-3 telling cancer cells to commit apoptosis (suicide) - should such cells be around. And these are only three of the incredibly complex array of hormones in your body.
As long as you eat till full but no more on a HFLC diet, your body will naturally set itself in the healthiest state possible and you will see your fat stores progresively disappear. But a child on LCHF will still grow. And quite well in fact. Without deficits.
Please read the conclusions of the attached abstract
PLoS One. 2014 Feb 7;9(2):e88278. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088278. eCollection 2014.
Nutrition and Health - The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study.
Burkert NT, Muckenhuber J, Großschädl F, Rásky E, Freidl W.
Author information
Abstract
Population-based studies have consistently shown that our diet has an influence on health. Therefore, the aim of our study was to analyze differences between different dietary habit groups in terms of health-related variables. The sample used for this cross-sectional study was taken from the Austrian Health Interview Survey AT-HIS 2006/07. In a first step, subjects were matched according to their age, sex, and socioeconomic status (SES). After matching, the total number of subjects included in the analysis was 1320 (N = 330 for each form of diet - vegetarian, carnivorous diet rich in fruits and vegetables, carnivorous diet less rich in meat, and carnivorous diet rich in meat). Analyses of variance were conducted controlling for lifestyle factors in the following domains: health (self-assessed health, impairment, number of chronic conditions, vascular risk), health care (medical treatment, vaccinations, preventive check-ups), and quality of life. In addition, differences concerning the presence of 18 chronic conditions were analyzed by means of Chi-square tests. Overall, 76.4% of all subjects were female. 40.0% of the individuals were younger than 30 years, 35.4% between 30 and 49 years, and 24.0% older than 50 years. 30.3% of the subjects had a low SES, 48.8% a middle one, and 20.9% had a high SES. Our results revealed that a vegetarian diet is related to a lower BMI and less frequent alcohol consumption.
Moreover, our results showed that a vegetarian diet is associated with poorer health (higher incidences of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders), a higher need for health care, and poorer quality of life. Therefore, public health programs are needed in order to reduce the health risk due to nutritional factors.
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10...
What LCHF does? - increases ketone bodies
Forsch Komplementmed. 2013;20(6):444-53. doi: 10.1159/000357765. Epub 2013 Dec 16.
Fasting therapy for treating and preventing disease - current state of evidence.
Michalsen A1, Li C.
Author information
Abstract
Periods of deliberate fasting with restriction of solid food intake are practiced worldwide, mostly based on traditional, cultural or religious reasons. There is large empirical and observational evidence that medically supervised modified fasting (fasting cure, 200-500 kcal nutritional intake per day) with periods of 7-21 days is efficacious in the treatment of rheumatic diseases, chronic pain syndromes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome. The beneficial effects of fasting followed by vegetarian diet in rheumatoid arthritis are confirmed by randomized controlled trials. Further beneficial effects of fasting are supported by observational data and abundant evidence from experimental research which found caloric restriction and intermittent fasting being associated with deceleration or prevention of most chronic degenerative and chronic inflammatory diseases. Intermittent fasting may also be useful as an accompanying treatment during chemotherapy of cancer. A further beneficial effect of fasting relates to improvements in sustainable lifestyle modification and adoption of a healthy diet, possibly mediated by fasting-induced mood enhancement. Various identified mechanisms of fasting point to its potential health-promoting effects, e.g., fasting-induced neuroendocrine activation and hormetic stress response, increased production of neurotrophic factors, reduced mitochondrial oxidative stress, general decrease of signals associated with aging, and promotion of autophagy. Fasting therapy might contribute to the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases and should be further evaluated in controlled clinical trials and observational studies.
The argument that "vegans live longer" has to do with the euivalent of the healthy worker effect. When researchers compared people who shopped at a health food markets, there was no difference between meat-eaters and vegans. But vegans who did not supplement had deficits of B12, vitamin D and iron among other things.
Sure, they were "thinner" than meat eaters. My own personal observation suggests they are emaciated, not "healthy thin".
As for Michele Obama, I think she is well intentioned but does not have a clue. She really was concerned when her daughter's MD told her that her daughter's BMI was "creeping up". I wonder how to bypass her advisors on "health" to get her the right picture so she can see how much damage her initiative is doing. But I guess I'm dreaming.
When a clueless Deepak Chopra is happy to support the weightless project, we really have a long way to go. The message of the site (https://weightlessproject.org/) and its video is that obese people are responsible for hunger in the world: if only they stopped eating all the time and being so lazy, it would be possible to feed the poor. And this is official thinking.
Please do continue to provide excellent articles to counterbalance this official disinformation.
You are dreaming Francois, I was a dreamer too, it can be very depressing. Now I just talk to those who want to listen - often these are people who 'tried it all and nothing worked' and listen to what my friends and I have to offer as a "I have nothing to lose attitude". Many of them, after few months on designed LCHF say that they did not feel that good since teenage years.
M. Obama has Ivy League trained family health professionals who know it all. Period. They know for example that to lose weight one has to eat less and move more. Period. They also know that saturated animal fat (most of them think that there is only one animal fat) causes obesity, which causes heart diseases, bowel cancer, diabetes. Period.
Pol Merkur Lekarski. 2013 Dec;35(210):397-401.
[Controversies around diet proteins].
[Article in Polish]
Cichosz G1, Czeczot H2.
Author information
Abstract
Critical theories regarding proteins of anima origin are still and still popularized, though they are ungrounded from scientific point of view. Predominance of soya proteins over the animal ones in relation to their influence on calcium metabolism, bone break risk or risk of osteoporosis morbidity has not been confirmed in any honest, reliable research experiment. Statement, that sulphur amino acids influence disadvantageously on calcium metabolism of human organism and bone status, is completely groundless,
the more so as presence of sulphur amino acids in diet (animal proteins are their best source) is the condition of endogenic synthesis of glutathione, the key antioxidant of the organism, and taurine stimulating brain functioning.
Deficiency of proteins in the diet produce weakness of intellectual effectiveness and immune response. There is no doubt that limitation of consumption of animal proteins of standard value is not good for health.
In Dr. Lustig's book, Fat Chance, he reports by hearsay that the Obamas took notice of Gary Taubes's piece in the New York Times, Is Sugar Toxic? (Actually, I think Lustig had the name of the author wrong, but it was Taubes's article.) Nothing was done, Lustig griped, as Obama lacked the political capital to make an issue of it. But perhaps this new initiative on sugar indicates some White House action on the issue, which would be a good thing. I will applaud them for that if credit is due. Carter could have made similar changes but went too far and the whole effort died. So better to make incremental changes that have some effect, than go for everything and get nowhere.
Finally, though many were afraid that sulfur-containing amino-acids would increase the body's acid load and create potentially osteoporosis, no study has demonstrated this for animal protein but the link between grain, acid load and osteoporosis is quite clearly demonstrated.
(The Surprising Truth About Wheat,Carbs And Sugar - Your Brains Silent Killers)
It makes fascinating reading!!
http://ab.co/1q2CFuq
cutting long story short, mice are physiologically tuned-up for tens of millions of years to eat seeds, grains and grass and maybe occasional dead insect. Any one who feeds mice different ratio of protein/carbs/fats and translates it to humans simply does not know what he/she is doing, does not understand physiology of rodents OR, and I would put my bet on it, has a $$$ agenda.
Please go to Outback and ask a grain farmer what mice eat, if she/he says: " Oooo little buggers mostly chew on my neighbor's sheep legs" - than I am wrong.
Prof. Le Couteur says himself in this interview that "we can not extrapolate the data from mice to humans" - so what the hell did he do this studies for wasting tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars ??!!
The answer is that, although he says that "we can not extrapolate the data from mice to humans", he (and his pay masters) knows all to well that general public will not remember (or will not record) this sentence. What people will remember is " high protein diet means short life span"; "High carbohydrate diet - longer life".
Yet another example of pharma manipulated experiment and presentation of results. Shame on you Le Couteur
Well Mr. LeCouteur do you know, off hand, which macronutrient influences insulin response and insulin signaling pathway the most ?
He also says that many studies involving humans show that high protein intake is associated with short lifespan - show me one of those many studies, please.
(as we all know here LCHF is not high protein - but this detail is always lost on people like LeCouteur)
Shame on you LeCouteur