Why so anti-fat?

This topic contains 3 replies, has 3 voices, and was last updated by Botany Bill 10 years, 10 months ago.

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Botany Bill

11:27 am
18 Jun 13
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One thing I see in the book that I don’t agree with is the anti-fat message. In the book, it’s written about (ie, of course we should not eat much fat) and not justified. There is so much evidence of the benefits of fat and the negative impacts of low-fat diets. I’m very surprised to see it in what I see as a nutritional book.

In fact, the book even talks about a study on overweight people with one being encouraged to eat all the high-fat food on non-fasting days while the other ate low-fat. The high-fat group lost more weight and the conclusion was very flawed. I’m not surprised at all at this result. The low-fat group likely ate more sugar, which is the typical tradeoff if one reduces fat. Low-fat foods tend to be higher in sugar. Sugar makes us fat more than anything else in our diet. Fat is very healthful. Sugar is detrimental.

AmandaBB

3:40 pm
18 Jun 13
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I agree but only if you balance everything out. Going overboard on fat isn’t good either since you’ll end up lacking in fiber. We do need at least 20% fat in our diet to absorb the fat soluble vitamins.
In the Netherlands they recommend the following:
fat: 20-40%
carbs: >40%
proteins; 10-25%
I’ve noticed that if you eat healthy and mainly eat natural, non-refined, products you always end up with the right %.

Pixie_Pie1

8:03 pm
18 Jun 13
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I’m no doctor, but I agree with Botany Bill. A while back I saw the movie Lorenzo’s Oil about a boy with a degenerative neurological disease caused by a buildup of a certain kind of fat. Of course the doctors recommended that they eliminate fat from his diet. The parents did exhaustive research to try to help their son and discovered a study on Polish rats where the bodies of rats that were deprived of this fat overcompensated by actually producing an excess of the fat internally! They found that by giving him a special kind of oil, he saw improvement. This is not to say that all fat is good–I doubt that if the boy ate greasy cheesburgers that he would have been helped–but it makes sense to me that if you cut back too much on fat, the body might overproduce its own cholesterol, which I’ve been told by doctors is the case with me. (I’m basically a big Polish rat! :o) I’m with you, Bill. I suspect that SUGAR is just as, if not more, dangerous than fat.

Botany Bill

4:39 am
25 Jun 13
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Hi AmandaBB –

I don’t understand how the tradeoff is between fat and fiber. I get tons of fiber in a diet with plenty of natural, whole-food fat – saturated and unsaturated. Greens and beans, in particular.

You may know there’s a lot more to our need for fat than processing lipophilic micronutrients.