The good fat bad fat controversy!

VfM4meplse

GreyQueen wrote: »

Until I reset my metabolism by carb restriction, I was a total sugar-fiend, a bit like thriftwizard's daughter, with an uncontrollable urge to stuff my face with sugary rubbish and bread. Once reset, which takes from a few days to a week or so, I am effectively burning my own body fat down. I also don't crave sweeties or get the wobbles and have to eat every 1-2 hours.

This isn't a diet in the sense of doing something for a while to achieve some weightloss, then back to business as usual, rinse and repeat ad nauseum (sic). It's a permanant change of lifestyle.

Typical breakfast chez GQ; 8-10 veg salad, heaping plateful, sprinkled with sesame seeds and containing two hardboiled eggs and a slug of cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil. Lunch is a smaller version of same with a very small amount of protein such as cold cooked meat.

Snack at about 4 pm (timed meds with food requre this) was yesterday some celery sticks with camenbert. Evening meal, something like more fresh veg and a modest amount of meat or fish. Little or no spuds. Snacks not usually required but might have a few nuts if feeling peckish.

Wow! Don't you get sick of eating salad and cold food, though?

I can see why this works though. I'm not out of the woods for carbs, that will be next for me!

luxor4t

meritaten wrote: »

.......
I was thinking back and in my childhood most women were rather more 'well padded' than today. I mean the average woman. today they are either thin or obese! Okay - slight exaggeration there but you know what I mean! ....

^ this made me think back.


When I was growing up in the 1960s (born late 50s) everybody's mum and granny had a girdle (grannies usually said corset). Unlike today's glamorous burlesque fashions, these were an ugly pink, reinforced to the point of being bullet proof, and with dangly suspenders attached. I dreaded the thought of having to wear one, but they seemed compulsory.


Today's "shapewear" seems weedy in comparison.


My mother was a serial dieter in the 60s, in fact she still is today, but at least she doesn't force herself into a girdle every morning.


Sorry to go off topic

Bathory

My own thoughts on this is that I grew up thinking that butter and whole milk was very bad and the low fat alternatives were better for you. I was a 70's kid and remember a lot of the advertising to get people to buy the low fat spreads.

I use butter now as all it is is churned milk but I have noticed that our supermarket has very little selection when it comes to butter, yet has a whole aisle of low fat spreads. I have also gone back to using beef dripping for cooking. Low fat to me means that manufacturers have taken fat out and put in more sugar (or sugar substitute) and I try avoid it if possible. I have also given up buying skinned chicken fillets as they taste of nothing.

My experience with low fat diets in the past are not good and I always failed. There was one I went on where you ate lots of grapefruit (as it was supposed to burn excess fat) and not much else apart from melba toast, lettuce and boiled eggs- it made me feel ill.

I don't know if its true but heard that if you put out butter on one plate and low fat spread on another that flies will go nowhere near the spread.

OneLeggedPig

I eat a starch-based diet, so most of my calories come from the following (in descending order):

Potatoes
Bread
Pasta/Couscous
Beans
Lentils
Fruit
Vegetables

it works well for me. And I am quite greedy and eat a lot of food. Doctors have used this kind of diet to successfully treat patients with heart disease at T2 diabetes.

No one ever got fat on steamed potatoes and rice and wholeweat pasta. They got fat on the cheese, butter, meat and vegetable oil they slathered over those things.

Yes, you absolutely can lose weight with any diet that reduces you caloric intake enough. But I think a low fat whole foods diet is the best for long term health.

The NHS eatwell dietary advice is good, the problem is that people don't follow it. Very very few people eat a genuinely low-fat diet (in which fat is 15% of total calories, or less).

VfM4meplse

OneLeggedPig wrote: »

No one ever got fat on steamed potatoes and rice and wholeweat pasta.

You couldn't be more wrong!

GreyQueen

VfM4meplse wrote: »

You couldn't be more wrong!

I'd agree with that.

Pasta will upset your blood sugar for 4-6 hours. And you can carry out an experiment with a blood sugar monitor if you like; eat two slices of wholemeal bread with nothing added, monitoring your blood sugar levels before and after. On another day, do the same with a snickers bar. Your blood glucose will spike more with the bread than with the chocolate bar.

We don't want our blood sugar spiking because if it does it long enough and high enough, you will wear out the insulin producing cells in your pancreas and end up with type 2 diabetes. This is about as scary as it gets and raises your morbidity for many diseases several fold, inc cancers and heart disease. And will knock years off your lifespan.

All the middle-aged vegetarian starch-lovers I know are obese and either diabetic or pre-diabetic and one had bowel cancer in their forties. They like pasta, too.

PS I eat my cooked meal in the evening and the daily salad is constantly varying its ingredients. Today's was grated carrot, two boiled eggs, celery, small apple, ruby chard and mint (off allotment), cucumber and radish and avocado. Tomorrow's will be different. Tonight's supper will be post-archery and I'm planning braised pork loin with hg leeks and possibly a few other oddments yet to be decided, with 85% cocoa chocolate for dessert.

Cos I like to suffer for my weightloss - although it is taking me longer to get around the large call-centre where I work as colleagues keep stopping me to ask me how I'm losing the weight.........:rotfl:

Goldiegirl

As I've said before, I have to eat a low salt diet due to Menieres.


Apart from that, I try to eat reasonably .


Normally for breakfast I'll have porridge, muesli or Weetabix.


Lunch will normally be a sandwich or a couple of slices of toast, with a piece of fruit afterwards


Dinner is usually a portion of meat, poultry or fish with vegetables and a portion of either potatoes, pasta or rice. One or two nights a week we'll eat vegetarian.


After dinner I'd normally have a yogurt.


I normally cook using oil rather than lard


At supper time I might have another piece of fruit or some nuts and seeds.


I rarely have biscuits or cakes


Watching one thing I eat (salt) is enough - I can't be doing with watching fat or carbs as well - I can't be counting the value of everything that passes my lips - for me, that's too much.


I walk each day for exercise, and my weight is in proportion to my height - that's good enough for me.

OneLeggedPig

GreyQueen wrote: »

I'd agree with that.

To get fat on pasta (no oil no cheese, just veg) you'd have to absolutely eat to bursting every day. The reason is that when cooked it is of a very low calorie density, so you fill your stomach before taking on a lot of calories.

Pasta will upset your blood sugar for 4-6 hours. And you can carry out an experiment with a blood sugar monitor if you like; eat two slices of wholemeal bread with nothing added, monitoring your blood sugar levels before and after. On another day, do the same with a snickers bar. Your blood glucose will spike more with the bread than with the chocolate bar.

We don't want our blood sugar spiking because if it does it long enough and high enough, you will wear out the insulin producing cells in your pancreas and end up with type 2 diabetes. This is about as scary as it gets and raises your morbidity for many diseases several fold, inc cancers and heart disease. And will knock years off your lifespan.

Eating is supposed to raise your blood sugar. There is a bit of a modern obsession with this, but that is the idea of eating, to give you energy.

And that isn't how Type 2 diabetes is brought about. It's primarily through obesity.

A Dr called Walter Kempner, in the fifties, cured patients with severe cases of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, using a diet where most of the calories were from white rice, sugar, and fruit juice. It's an interesting study to look up.

More recently, Drs such as Dr Neal Barnard have used a high carbohydrate plant-based diet to treat chronic diseases. Here is one published study as an example:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677007/

The diet here was 75% carbohydrate. 10% fat.

All the middle-aged vegetarian starch-lovers I know are obese and either diabetic or pre-diabetic and one had bowel cancer in their forties. They like pasta, too.

I'm not surprised about the people you know, as most people eat starch with huge amounts of dairy and oil, which are very calorie dense.

Type 2 and obesity wasn't a problem in China before the Americanisation of their eating. When they ate white rice and veg, they were fine, and slim. We see this pattern all around the world.

GreyQueen

If you think white rice is healthy, may I suggest you put the words 'beriberi' into a search engine and have a couple of minutes' reading time? And what about 'golden rice' as science attempts to genetically engineer rice to express beta carotene in the endosperm to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of rice-dependant children under 5 each year from acute vitamin deficiency? It's an excellent foodstuff, this rice - not.

And if the Chinese have been historically small and thin, the thousands of famines they have had to suffer might just have a bit of a bearing on that - it is a rare year in the past 2,000 where there hasn't been a famine in some part of China.

I know several people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who represent the first generation of their Chinese and Vietnamese families to be born in the UK and brought up on Western not traditional white-rice-and-veggie diets.

Interestingly, they are all just over and just under 6ft tall, men and women alike, and of robust build, unlike their much shorter, scrawnier parents.

Which strongly suggests to me that their parents and other antecedants were malnourished and not capable of expressing their genetic potential due to inadequate nutrition.

VfM4meplse

Goldiegirl wrote: »

Watching one thing I eat (salt) is enough - I can't be doing with watching fat or carbs as well - I can't be counting the value of everything that passes my lips - for me, that's too much.

It probably is enough - because lots of high salt foods also contain sugar to mask the salty flavour. Being conscious of salt means you'll be avoiding these products anyway! And the walking is great too.

One thing I gave up months ago is fruit yoghurt: I'd find it easy to demolish a 450g pot in one sitting. It's only when I realised how much sugar was in it I decided to stick to natural only. I don't drink fruit juices either for that reason.