The good fat bad fat controversy!

GreyQueen

The advantage of cooking from scratch at home from plain ingredients, which is very OS, is that you can see and control what is added to your food.

I never add salt to food as I cook it. Veggies are steamed and dishes which might have salt, such as soups and casseroles, and have freshly-ground black pepper, herbs and spices instead.

Because I am unaccustomed to eating salt, I'm very aware when I do encounter it. Even ice-cream tastes salty, of all things.

One thing I have noticed by really cutting back sugar is that it's made my palette more interested in, and accepting of, other flavours. Hell, I'm even eating and enjoying olives, which is unheard of for me.

This has led to a wider diet and more variety of fresh produce, which I expect to find enhances overall health.

monnagran

Oh, GreyQueen. R E S P E C T !!!!

Olives? YEUGH,

x

globalds

I don't usually post on here ..But just following the trail of posts from the original thread.

I will add one more of my contentious views on here that I didn't post on that other thread .

I have read a few things about something that seems to run deeper than the carb , protein , fats type discussion that I find interesting and carries through to some of my diet choices.

It seems we are a creature that evolved in a nutrient rich but calorie low environment.

We store calories for rainy days ..yet with enough water in our diet will become nutrient starved in a very short time ..The whole vitamin D argument runs along that line.

We are designed for that it seems and because of that it should not be a surprise that when we can control our environment we build systems that overload ourselves with the very part of our requirements that were once scarce.

So to wrap up my longer than I expected explanation ..I worry far more about nutrients than calories ..

I seek out foods that are full of all that trace stuff ..lots of vegetables and fresh fish , shellfish and seaweed fruit such as berries and nuts not cooked but fresh ..( I will add I am a little worried about hormones in nuts ~ but that is for another thread )

I wish that our vegetable had as many nutrients as a few years ago . But I understand commercial interest dictates the products on our shelves .

I am glad that so many people seem to be thinking about how food is not just a fuel for the body but also in essence becomes part of that body.

I might well be wrong in lots of my ideas ..But I just can't accept that almost every health advocate for the now mainstream low fat diet that comes on TV telling me how to eat ... just doesn't look very healthy .

septemberblues

OneLeggedPig wrote: »

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.



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.


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.

I can't believe what I'm reading! I'm diabetic and I DONT want my blood sugar to rise after eating, so eating low carb is the only way to go. I have checked my blood before and after meals for rises and bread, pasta, rice etc are just as bad for me as eating sweets! I would imagine you have never tested your blood and expect you are eating your way to diabetes........... Pure fruit juice is pure sugar and just as bad.

I use organic coconut oil a lot (£3.99 a big jar in Home Bargains), and also butter. I avoid low fat products as they seem to be full of chemicals.

GreyQueen

I think globalds is right on the money.

We did evolve in restricted-food environments and we are wired to over-eat when we get the opportunity, so we can engage our fat storage facilities to tide us over the inevitable lean patches. It would take several weeks to starve most of us to death, maybe even months.

Compare and contrast our evolutionary environment and hardwired tendancies with the modern world, with food everywhere you turn around. And usually incredibly fattening food based on very few food groups (chiefly wheat and sugars in various forms) and it's no wonder many of us struggle with weight.

And you're absolutely right about nutrient density, as so much of our cropland has been flogged to death by farming methods which value yield above all else.

I'm an allotment gardener and grow some of my own produce. At the moment, I am supplementing my diet with chard and parsley which has overwintered. I know its history and have been fortifying that soil for nine seasons now, without an artificial fertiliser or pesticide in sight. As we come further into the summer, plants which are now seedlings will start to bear, and their produce will be a greater proportion of my diet.

I'd suggest everyone who is physically able, and can access some ground and some spare time, could usefully think about gardening and taking back some of their nutrition from the food industry.

And look at actively supporting smallholders and farmers who grow good stuff on good ground.

VfM4meplse

septemberblues wrote: »

I use organic coconut oil a lot (£3.99 a big jar in Home Bargains), and also butter. I avoid low fat products as they seem to be full of chemicals.

I bought 4 tubs of the stuff recently but have not yet had the guts to use it....after years of indoctrination about saturated fat. I had hoped it might make returning to a mostly vegan diet easier (I say mostly, but I can't give up milk in tea and coffee ). I trust butter in a way that I still don't quite trust coconut oil, so I think I'm gong to end up giving it away.

OneLeggedPig

septemberblues wrote: »

I can't believe what I'm reading! I'm diabetic and I DONT want my blood sugar to rise after eating, so eating low carb is the only way to go. I have checked my blood before and after meals for rises and bread, pasta, rice etc are just as bad for me as eating sweets! I would imagine you have never tested your blood and expect you are eating your way to diabetes........... Pure fruit juice is pure sugar and just as bad.

I use organic coconut oil a lot (£3.99 a big jar in Home Bargains), and also butter. I avoid low fat products as they seem to be full of chemicals.

I understand why you'd be concerned about that, but you're treating the symptom rather than the disease. Diabetes isn't about blood sugar going up, it's about the sugar staying in the blood because it can't get into the cells properly, because of fat accumulation inside the cells. Insulin is the "key" to get glucose into the cells, so your body produces more of it to try and get the glucose in.

So you can control it by not eating things that raise your blood sugar, or treat it by reducing the fat accumulation in the cells which blocks the glucose getting in.

The study I posted a link to shows some of Dr Barnard's work with a low fat whole foods diet, and the effect it has on diabetes. The diet used in that study, which worked really well for the subjects, was 75% carbohydrate. He has a lot of resources on this and has had a lot of success with treating patients this way, as have other doctors.

OneLeggedPig

I also find it quite interesting that people are very concerned about nutrient density, and very focused on that.

The chronic diseases in the western world are all from excess- excess fat, calories, added sugar. If you eat fruit and vegetables regularly then you don't really need to worry about micro-nutrients, unless you are diagnosed with a particular issue. It's also worth remembering that people have lived very well on very limited and repetitive diets.

thriftwizard

For what it's worth, IMHO the most important thing is to remember that we are individuals and we differ, quite considerably; one size does not fit all. What suits & benefits one person may not suit the next, may even harm them. For example, my kids grew up eating nuts as snacks, but their young cousin is violently allergic to them. Most of us love fish, but one of my sons can't even stand the smell & having some distinct autistic tendencies, probably would actually starve before eating it; he was taken to hospital twice when living abroad recently, having fainted from hunger rather than eat "strange" food. So a carb-rich diet may indeed benefit some people - but not others.

The one thing that is pretty obvious is that a sugar & chemical-rich diet isn't benefitting anyone anywhere.

fuddle

I think that's my concern with many low fat factory produced foodstuffs thriftwizard and I do agree with you.

In order to make low fat appealing taste wise I think what fat is extracted, or watered down, other things have to added in order to bring the taste back up to scratch, hence my feeling that many low fat foodstuffs can appear to be messed with.

Oneleggedpig I agree with you but as an unhealthy western society we need to move more. To eat to excess is based on how much we move. It's very easy to eat over how much we actually need and even though a low fat diet can help to keep the calories low too it may well not be a diet that is nutritious, well balanced etc.

All of this good bad in the media is just getting silly in my opinion and even though I enjoy reading about the science behind studies, fascinated in fact, I am tiring of debates set upto sensationalise a headline.

Fruits, vegs, nuts, seeds, meats, fish, dairy heck even complex carbs can be enjoyed. We can function as healthily as we can, eat what we need as fuel with what the land gives us, make a myriad of meals, enjoy and not worry about a damn thing in doing so.