It is probably safe to say that we all have either ourselves or personally known someone that has tried to lose weight on a really low fat diet. I can also say that with great confidence that 99% of those fail to make it long term with success on that extreme low fat diet. Over the past fifty years we have all been told that fat was bad for us because it will make you fat. So what did Americans do? They ate less fat. Over the last fifty years if you follow the trend lines and graphs it proves that Americans succeeded, they ate less fat. However, obesity is on the rise and at astronomical rates. How can this be so? Well, maybe we have been looking at the wrong enemy for the last half century.
Where it all began:
In the 1950’s a physiologist and graduate of the University of California Berkeley by the name of Ancel Keys proposed that saturated fat raised blood cholesterol and in effect led to heart disease. This was the conclusion after his famous 7 countries study that included the United States. The more saturated fat the country ate the more heart disease the country was plagued with. This all sounds great and makes sense until you look at the fact there were twenty two total countries in the study and when all twenty two were used for analysis, there was no cause and effect of saturated fat consumption causing heart disease. It is with this faulty and terrible science that Key’s would press the issue to the American Heart Association to set the new guidelines of a healthy diet.
As the years went on and with critics of Key’s being silenced the new standard was issued, a low fat diet was the best diet for your health. Researchers also began noticing that obesity was strongly tied into this heart disease epidemic Keys had proposed (albeit with no real evidence). This led to another idea that fat also made you fat. Ultimately, it was these two correlations that occurred with defective science that made Americans believe that fat made you fat and then would kill you with heart disease later on in your life. This solidified the low fat diet plan for the future of American health.
Where they went wrong:
Keys and colleagues hardly looked at how heart disease was formed and they certainly never looked at what causes fat accumulation. They assumed causality instead of looking at it scientifically and physiologically which was ironic seeing as how Keys was a physiologist himself. If someone was to tell you that you that they were in debt, you would have to assume that they had that debt because they spent more than they make. It really is simple math. However, it does not tell you WHY that person has spent more than have. This is the ultimate principal and logic that will allow us to look deeper into the real cause of how people become overweight.
Reality of a Low Fat diet:
A low fat diet means by mathematical calculations you will have a high carbohydrate diet as well. There is no denying that carbohydrate consumption has soared over the last fifty years because of the low fat diet model. We have been duped into believing fat is bad for us which left us with two avenues, up our carbs or our protein. Since it is pretty tough to up protein past the forty percent mark of total calories and many have adopted a vegetarian diet, this left us with one option, up our carb intake. Because carbs are so much easier to consume, especially when they are refined, this allowed for many to up carbs often times above sixty and seventy percent of total calories consumed. This causes a huge insulin spike and allows insulin to stay at chronically high levels in the body. This is a disaster for anyone looking to lose fat in their body as I will explain next.
All the while when Keys and colleagues were convincing us that saturated fat was the public enemy number one, many top endocrinologists had already worked out another target and that was insulin. They knew that fat accumulation was a hormonal process in which insulin plays a huge role. Insulin has a few roles in the body which include lowering blood sugar after a meal, shuttling glucose to the muscles for storage but most effectively it promotes the storage of fat. They knew insulin not only stored fat but also prevents fat from being released out of the fat cell due to the fact that when insulin is present Hormone Sensitive Lipase is inhibited. Hormone Sensitive Lipase allows the breakdown of stored fat also known as triglycerides in the body to be released and burned as fuel. Another hormone in the body that ties into fat storage is Lipoprotein Lipase. LPL allows the body to break down fatty acids in the bloodstream and put it into the fat cell where the fatty acids can be bound together by a glycerol molecule and then stored. When insulin is present LPL receptors pull in a significant amount of fat into the cells causing more and more fat storage. Insulin in effect allows for more fat accumulation and less fat mobilization in the body. Looking at it physiologically it is easy to see why insulin, because of high carbohydrate consumption, can be a disaster for anyone looking to loose fat.
Later in a future post I will talk about the effects of carbohydrates on appetite and why they can cause you to overeat and how they are addicting to humans and can also led to obesity.
