Jacked Fitness UK

Can Saturated Fat Help Me Lose Body Fat?

If you’re one of the 90% who believe a jacket potato is healthier than chips because chips are fried, or that cutting the rind off of your gammon steaks will help you slide back into ‘those’ jeans – this one’s for you….

In today’s instalment I’m going to dispel a few myths around what a healthy diet is, and what a healthy diet should look like. It is my argument that dietary fats are as essential to achieving a lean healthy body, and if you’re looking to shed the pounds, those ‘healthy’ choices like jacket potatoes and brown rice have to go.

If you've followed a fad diet, you have plenty of company. But have you been able to stay on these deprivation diets for a long time? And if you did lose weight, did the pounds stay off once you went back to your usual way of eating? These diets usually have a lot in common. They are hard to stick to, they reduce your calorie intake leaving you ravenous, they are high in sugars and low in fats, AND THEY JUST DON’T WORK!!!

Fad diets don't help you keep off the weight in the long term. So what does work? The best diet is not a diet at all, but a way of life that includes food you enjoy, exercise, and healthy habits.

I’m going to explain to you just how reducing your carbohydrate consumption and increasing your dietary fat intake will help you shed the pounds, forever! Read on to find out why.

The Theory

By taking a diet that resembles how our ancestors ate and comparing it to how we eat today it’s pretty easy to spot patterns, and see where we have gone wrong. Why do we crave the foods we’re led to believe are bad for us? It’s simply because they’re the foods we are meant to be eating! For millions of years we survived (very well) on a diet consisting of no sugar, little starch and vegetable fats and huge amounts of animal fats. Pre agricultural humans were taller than today, had more robust skeletal structures had better teeth and show no evidence of heart disease or obesity. Since the creation of agriculture our health has devolved, and we’re now being told, the natural  diet that sustained our species for more than 99% of human history is bad for us, will put us in an early grave and agricultural products which were never intended for us are the key to a long healthy, lean life. Naturally, how could we have known to grind wheat to flour and bake it into bread or pasta? It’s just not for us. Why else would so many people have intolerances to it.

So, everybody knows saturated fat increases cholesterol, and high cholesterol will kill us, right? It’s a big fat, obese lie, and to explain why saturated fats are no more harmful than drinking water, here’s a quick history lesson.

The Cholesterol Myth

In the 40’s Ancel Keys a respected physiologist came up with a theory that as saturated fat goes up, then so too does cholesterol which in turn is the sole reason for increasing numbers of heart disease. The lipid hypothesis was born. The theory earned Keys millions (and got his mugshot in Time magazine) but has since been debunked by scientists time and time again. Even now some 70 years later there’s no published thesis, paper or journal which can link dietary fat intake with heart disease, but through Keys work, endorsed and pushed by government, the idea that fat kills is deeply engrained in the lexicon of common public thought. George Mann famously said – “The lipid hypothesis is possibly the greatest scientific scam of this century, perhaps any century.” A study conducted by Harvard university in the 1980’s followed thousands of test subjects over many years, and concluded heart disease and heart attacks were just as frequent in those with a low fat diet than those with a high intake of dietary fats. 

The link between serum (blood) cholesterol and atherosclerosis (the clogging of arteries) is another interesting topic. Firstly inflammation and the plaguing out of artery walls causes heart disease. Cholesterol does play a part in this, but not in the way everybody thinks. LDL – bad cholesterol and HDL – good, or so we’re told. These are both proteins, which are responsible for moving cholesterol either from the liver to your tissue or back from tissue to your liver for recycling. Now LDLs come in two forms, small and large respectively. Large is a harmless form of the protein, whereas the small LDLs are responsible for the packing out of arteries. Now the experts will have us believe in order to keep out total cholesterol levels low, we need to avoid foods such as red meat, eggs, etc etc… Which is again, untrue. William Castick in an ongoing study concluded that the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, then the lower the persons blood cholesterol. Recent studies have now proven excessive carbohydrate to be the cause of elevated small package LDL.

The pattern of atherosclerosis is as follows – Damage to artery wall – Cholesterol heals the ‘cracks’ – Oxidation of the LDL – Plaque – Heart disease. Cholesterol rich foods are a scapegoat for the problem, while the three main causes for the initial inflammation are smoking, stress, and elevated blood sugar from excessive carbohydrate consumption.

So thanks to a small handful of politicians in the mid 20^th century the official government guidelines still are,- a low fat diet reduced blood cholesterol and reduces risk of heart disease. There’s even proof of how, particularly the American government strong armed and pushed this by cutting funding and grants to researchers and scientists who disagreed. Keeping a mass population eating agriculturally processed carbohydrate is worth a lot of money. There’s also financial links between research companies and statin (cholesterol pills) manufacturers, but that’s a whole other story!

It is  my opinion, in a decade the lipid hypothesis will be on the junk pile, as it’s becoming more and more apparent it’s just not true (even though I was taught it at college) As a side note it’s been proven, that as a woman the higher your cholesterol the longer you live. There’s literally no point in women using statins or any cholesterol lowering drug.

Vegetable oils were manufactured in response to the lipid hypothesis. Pre veg oil everyone cooked in butter and lard (and heart disease was inherently lower) and so there was a call for an alternative which is higher in unsaturated fat and cholesterol free. People unfortunately just don’t fathom just how bad for your health these oils are. There’s nothing natural about them as the packaging would suggest - the extraction of these oils are the result a chemical proses.  There’s no coincidence that as the popularity for these fats grew, then so too did all the negative health problems associated with them – they destroy our immune system, weaken our cells, have strong links to some types of cancers and are in essence killing us. So again thanks to politicians, radical activists and so called experts we’ve been successfully scared away from perfectly healthy animal fats that have kept us functional and healthy for millions of years.

Just to name a couple of examples of how these diets have negatively impacted our lives… Men are now brainwashed into eating low saturated fat diets, have below optimal testosterone levels and are now prescribed Viagra to help with the most basic of human functions. Parents have been scared away from giving their kids full fat milk while their brains are developing and we now have a generation of children medicated for ADHD. Here’s a biggy that’s been swept under the carpet – Low cholesterol can be a trigger for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. Just to name a few, the list goes on.

So as we can see the rise in obesity and heart disease is clearly about one thing – carbohydrates. We need to get our energy from somewhere, so a low fat diet nearly always means a high carb diet, which is exactly what the experts tell us to do - the government eat well plate suggests 55% of every meal should be from carbohydrates. (Incidentally seeds and grains aren’t the native diet of any mammal). The government eat well plate is more of a marketing tool for selling agricultural products than it is about health. It’s advised 300g of carbohydrate is optimum for someone consuming 2000 calories a day. If you imagine just how much broccoli, carrots, green peas (our ancestral diet consisted pretty much exclusively of low GI food sources) it would take to hit 300! It’s just not possible. The only way it can realistically be achieved is with sugars and starches (which are converted to sugar almost instantly in the GI tract).

So here’s what to do…

Eat more fat and kill those carbs! It’s as easy as that. I urge everyone reading this to make that change for one week. You’ll have more energy, sleep well, you'll handle stress better and lose excessive body fat. Now it can be easier said than done. We have been told to avoid fats, since, forever so you’ll have to retrain your brain to embrace dietary fats! Cook in butter, eat red meats, fish and whole eggs, enjoy nuts and avocados and cheese, all those things you have denied yourself. Eat plenty of fresh veg for fibre and vitamins, and drink water.

There are just two rules – EAT WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY AND EAT UNTIL YOU’RE FULL!!

I’ve heard it called the caveman diet, the paleo diet, eating natural – It’s not a diet, It’s just how things were meant to be! For more information contact me anytime to discuss a diet and exercise programme. Make the change, love the results…