You really think a low fat diet is healthy???? Read this...

LeanLioness

I have known for the last 6 years that a low fat diet is unhealthy...............

I have the proof of eating a high fat, high protein and my cholesterol is better now than it has been in years and years...............Eating a lot of fat, protein and eating natural carbs (vegetables and limited fruit) has DECREASED my cholesterol, raised my HDL and lowered my LDL cholesterol..........

I posted my blood test results for people to see that a low fat diet is not necessarily the way to go......


I will never agan believe anything the Federal Government tells me regarding eating and being healthy.........

An all natural, moderate fat, moderate protein diet plan that is filled with lots of vegetables and some fruit and limited grains is the healthy eating plan..............

Here is some food for thought regarding how healthy a low fat eating plan really is...................

The widely-believed notion that low-fat diets are good for your health went “poof” this week – although the busting of that myth shouldn’t be news to regular readers of this column.

Low-fat diets didn’t reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer or invasive breast cancer, according to three large studies published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers divided 48,835 women into two groups based on diet-- one group with 19,541 women consumed a low fat diet and the other group with 29,294 women consumed their usual diets ­-- and followed the women for 8.1 years.

The most significant result of the $415 million study is that low-fat diets don’t reduce heart disease risk. As the researchers put it, “Over [an average] of 8.1 years, a dietary intervention that reduced total fat intake and increased intake of vegetables, fruits and grains did not significantly reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women and achieved only modest effects on cardiovascular risk factors…”

Low-fat diets didn’t even improve heart health among the population of women who had heart disease at the beginning of the study. In fact, the low-fat diet regimen was associated with a slightly increased risk of heart disease among these women.

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Think about that the next time you turn down the scrumptious banana-pecan French toast with a side of sausage in favor of choking down some tasteless low-fat cereal with skim milk.

So how did the low-fat myth come to be so widely accepted by the public in the first place? For the last 30 years we’ve been constantly bombarded with the message that low-fat is healthy – a message first broadcast by government and public health nannies, and then reinforced on a daily basis by the food industry selling low-fat products at high prices and by pharmaceutical companies selling cholesterol-lowering drugs in an effort to turn us into a “Lipitor Nation.”

But as has been previously pointed out in this column, scientific study has never supported the dietary propaganda thrust upon us during the past three decades.

Politically correct dietary theory, for example, postulates that high-fat diets -- particularly diets high in animal and saturated fats – can raise cholesterol levels to unhealthy levels. But in the much-vaunted Framingham Heart Study involving 5,200 men and women who have been extensively studied in over 1,000 published reports since 1948, high cholesterol levels were not associated with increased heart disease risk after age 47.

After age 47, in fact, those whose cholesterol went down had the highest risk of a heart attack. “For each 1 mg/dl drop of cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in coronary and total mortality,” reported the study's authors.

There are also the data from the ongoing highly-touted Nurses Health Study involving about 90,000 nurses studied since 1976 by Harvard University researchers. A 1997 interim report published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that total fat intake, animal fat intake, saturated fat intake and cholesterol intake weren’t associated with coronary heart disease.

Then just last a month, a study published in the Jan. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association involving the same group of women in the current study reported that low fat diets were associated with only moderate and temporary weight loss – an average of 4.8 pounds after the first year, after which most of the weight was regained.

None of this is to say that there aren’t some people with certain genetic backgrounds or medical conditions who might benefit from certain physician-prescribed dietary changes, but generally speaking, low-fat diets don’t appear to confer any significant health benefits that are detectable on a population scale.

“Low-fat,” of course, is not the only dietary myth of the last 30 years that has been debunked – low-salt and high-fiber diets have also been exposed as junk science.

A 2005 analysis of 13 previous studies involving 725,000 individuals published in the Dec. 14 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that high fiber diets did not reduce the risk of colon cancer.

Since 1995, 10 studies have examined whether lower sodium diets produce health benefits. Not a single one of those studies showed that lower sodium diets improved health outcomes for the general population.

What are some other dietary myths that may soon go by the wayside? The sugar scare is a prime candidate. Researchers have been trying for years to link sugar consumption with type 2 diabetes, and obesity in adults and children -- without success.

Another endangered scare involves so-called “trans fats” – vegetables oils altered to be firm at room temperature. In much the same mindless fashion that we were goaded into abandoning butter in the 1970s for high-trans fat margarines, we are now being pushed to consume only low-trans fat margarines -- even though no evidence indicates that trans fats are harmful or that a diet low in trans fats provides any health benefits.

The unfortunate fact is that, when it comes to diet and health, we’ve been misinformed, ripped off and unnecessarily medicated by junk scientists, behavior-control nannies and unscrupulous marketers in the government, public health community and the food and pharmaceutical industries. And, of course, let’s not forget the media that seldom miss opportunities to pump health scares and scams.

LeanLioness

Another article.............

Are you still caught up in the low-fat mantra of the past couple decades? Do you think you can't eat much fat if you are trying to lose weight? These ideas are still so prevalent in our media and in the low-fat products you see everywhere that it's no wonder you may still believe this. In fact, even many doctors still believe this.

However, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, in 1999-2000, an estimated 64 percent of adults in the United States were either obese or overweight. That's almost two thirds of the adult population, and one third of our children are now overweight as well. In the past 30 years, the number of overweight children has doubled. In just the past decade, the number of obese people in the U.S. has gone up two and one half times.

Obesity Increasing, But Percentage Fat in Diets Decreasing

Fifty years ago, only a small percentage of the population had problems with their weight. Now it's an epidemic! All this has happened while we cut back from 40 to around 32 percent fat as a percentage of our diet. Hmm, perhaps a low fat diet is not what we need in order to lose weight!

Low Fat Diets Unhealthy

Low-fat diets not only don't work, but they're low in vitamins A & D, they're not healthy, not natural, and they tend to promote weight gain! Research confirms this statement. The famous Framingham Study that started in 1948 is still going on, and it shows that the more saturated fat, the more calories, and the more cholesterol a person ate, the lower their serum cholesterol! The results also show that the more fat they ate, the less they weighed! In addition, fats including saturated fats are essential for good health. Fat soluble vitamins A & D are found in large quantities only in saturated fat-containing foods like egg yolks, butter, cream, whole milk and liver. Minerals also need fats and the fat soluble vitamin A in order to be properly absorbed and utilized by the body. Calcium needs the fat soluble vitamin D in order to be used properly by the body. So, we are eating less fat as a nation, and getting far less of the fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D, but are gaining weight.

Less Fat, More MSG

Perhaps another reason for the low fat diets not working is that since fat gives foods much of their flavor, when manufacturers cut out the fat, they add sugar, MSG and other chemicals to the food to enhance the taste. These can all have adverse effects on both our weight and our health. Many researchers believe that it is instead the addition of copious amounts of sugar to our diets that is causing our weight gain. In addition, MSG has weight gaining properties. MSG is fed to laboratory animals in order to fatten them up for experiments in which they need obese rats, so it is no surprise that when we eat a lot of MSG, we gain weight. Watch out, MSG does not have to be labeled as MSG in order to be in your food. In fact, it is used in lots, perhaps even most, of our packaged and restaurant foods today, especially in fast foods.

So in conclusion, eating a low fat diet will not help you to lose weight, in fact, it may well add to your weight gain, so start seeking out healthy types of fats to eat in your diet. Don't forget to include some of the saturated fats that contain vitamins A and D, as long as you look for meat and dairy products from pastured animals that are out in the pasture eating their natural diets. One resource for pastured animal products is www.eatwild.com

Copyright 2008, Karen Pijuan. This article may be copied in its entirety if all links remain intact, including those in the resource or about the author box.

Karen Pijuan is the owner of several health-related websites and has written numerous articles about nutrition, vitamins, healthy living, whole food supplements, natural body care and cleaning products, natural weight loss and more. Find out more about what to look for in a truly healthy vitamin, as well as resources for where to find the whole food vitamins she recommends at http://www.healthy-vitamins-rx.com Truly healthy organic and natural products such as air and water filters, food-based beyond organic vitamins, organic coconut oil and more can be found at http://www.ecoviva.com

weasleman42

Can you post links to the articles? Thanks.

tbrown1025

I have known for the last 6 years that a low fat diet is unhealthy...............

I will never agan believe anything the Federal Government tells me regarding eating and being healthy.........

I've never believed what the federal g'vt told me about any way I should live, evenmoreso these days, hahha! :laugh:

a_new_mii

I basically follow the macrobiotics way of eating, whole foods, raw and natural.
Only whole grains, no white flour or processed sugar.
I don't stick to it perfectly, but I know it's better for me than the high processed- low fat junk diet I used to adhere to- and you know what? I was always fat! When I found out I had high cholesterol, I was like 'WHAT?!'. Then I took a look at my diet and realized I wasn't eating any good fats either.
So those few grams o' fat a day have been building up in my arteries and yucking up my body.
I can't agree with your post more.

LeanLioness

Can you post links to the articles? Thanks.

Here you go..................

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184409,00.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Low-Fat-Diets-Are-Unhealthy-and-Dont-Work!&id=1376948



There are countless other articles that support this also..........