The good fat bad fat controversy!

Goldiegirl

GwylimT wrote: »

I'm a type two diabetic, my body fat at the moment is 9%, if I eat the suggested diet my blood sugar will sit at around 25 for hours, I don't particularly fancy blindness or kidney disease. I'll stick to my high fat virtually no carb diet which keeps me at a steady 5.2.

If I stayed on a high carb diet not only would I damage my sight etc permanently, I would also increase my body fat, which also increases the risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease and liver disease.

For people that have an illness, diet can be an essential factor in controlling it, and will be well aware of the risks involved, both short term and long term, if they deviate from a diet that they know works for them.


The situation isn't as clear cut for people who are otherwise healthy.

There's a lot of information on the Internet, and sometimes people read something, and decide to follow a diet regime because they like the sound of it. That's their prerogotive, but there's a tendency for them to become a bit evangelical about it, and almost preach to others about it - whether the regime is suitable for other people or not

I can't help thinking that, for the average person, with no underlying health issues, the way forward is a balanced diet, with everything in moderation and no excesses, coupled with some form of daily activity or excercise, is the way to long term health.

thriftwizard

Looking at old family photos not everyone is thin!

It's a myth that plagues those of us who deal in vintage clothes! We often hear people walking past our stands saying, "Oh, I'd love to dress like that! But people were SOOO tiny back then..."

The tiny clothes are the ones that got left behind, shoved to the back of the wardrobe & never worn! That's how they're on our stands, looking pristine - because they are; they never fitted anyone! But look closer, most of us have plenty of more normal-sized clothes.

However people undeniably were a different shape, whether or not that was partially caused by their choices of underwear; corset, anyone?! Back in the early 70s, my waist genuinely measured 22" which it certainly doesn't now! But then, I'm not 14 any more. People don't seem to have waists now, though; I'm forever mending clothes that they've tried on & broken the zips or seams, usually at the waist or the shoulders. The garment may actually be big enough most of the way around, but waists don't go in any more and shoulders aren't held straight; corsets made you stand much more upright and keep your shoulders back, and this, in its own right, makes people look thinner & healthier!

OneLeggedPig

NewShadow wrote: »

The proportions for cereals did actually increase on your charts. Numerical tables would be more useful, but I would suggest a 10% share increase (judging by eye).

I'm not a maths wizz exactly, but I've had a look as I was interested to see. The calculations show that the proportion of calories from flour and cereal products goes up from about 20.7% to about 23.6%. So it's an increase of about 3%. Not nothing but not big. I think added fats and oils looks to be the biggest increase- but again not huge.

But I'd agree that a lot of the UK's carbohydrate intake is from white flour products, which are quite high in calorie-density and so not ideal.

Stomach sizes aren't changing so my thought is that people are eating more calorie-dense food, and, as people have pointed out, eating out more.

I think we can all agree that we live in a "toxic food environment", where high processed, calorie-dense food, with lots of added salt, fat, and sugar, is everywhere- and it's cheap.

There is a significant difference between calorie density and satiety.

The general difference is you have to 'fill your stomach' to feel satisfied with low calorie food, but you need to eat smaller amounts of satisfying food to feel equally full.

The Satiety Index

There is a difference but they are strongly related. That's a really interesting resource you posted. Most (but no, not all) of the top satiating foods are low fat plant foods.

But it doesn't look like they adjusted this for calories? It actually states that "The index only takes into consideration for how long a certain food will keep you full, it
doesn’t say anything about nutritional value or calorie content"

So although beef and brown pasta score very close on satiety, brown pasts would be much much better for losing/maintaining weight, as it is less calories dense, so it's still true that if you ate beef until you were full, and brown pasta until you were full, you would end up eating fewer calories with the pasta.

Cheese scores high on satiety, but it is very very high in calorie density, so white pasta, despite being slightly lower on the satiety index, would be better in terms of intaking less calories, again for the reasons above.

They also conclude that "Plain boiled potatoes showed to be the most satisfying food tested according to energy
content, three times more satisfying than white bread."

"From a nutritional point of view plain boiled potatoes are an
excellent choice of diet food, full of vitamins and fibers.
Potatoes don’t make you gain weight, as long as you don’t eat
them with butter, sour cream, cheese etc."

OneLeggedPig

GwylimT wrote: »

I'm a type two diabetic, my body fat at the moment is 9%, if I eat the suggested diet my blood sugar will sit at around 25 for hours, I don't particularly fancy blindness or kidney disease. I'll stick to my high fat virtually no carb diet which keeps me at a steady 5.2.

If I stayed on a high carb diet not only would I damage my sight etc permanently, I would also increase my body fat, which also increases the risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease and liver disease.

The success of Dr Barnad and Dr Mcdougall's diabetes treatment diets are that they solve the blood sugar issue, rather than just avoiding it by not intaking sugar.

The study I posted earlier is an interesting read if you have time, and so are the free information resources on diabetes treatment from Dr Barnard. His patients and people who have followed his diet program have consistently had great results. He has some talks on Youtube and is very watchable.

But if what you are doing is helping you than obviously that's great, and I hope it continues to work for you.

NewShadow

OneLeggedPig wrote: »

Stomach sizes aren't changing so my thought is that people are eating more calorie-dense food, and, as people have pointed out, eating out more.

Your stomach is just a membrane sack - the more you eat the bigger it gets (like skin).

If you train your body to only be full when your stomach is at capacity, then you will eat increasingly large portions - thus the success of the 'belly band' at helping those with distended stomachs lose weight.

But it doesn't look like they adjusted this for calories? It actually states that "The index only takes into consideration for how long a certain food will keep you full, it
doesn’t say anything about nutritional value or calorie content"

Actually, in the text it explains they gave participants 240 kcal's of each food and monitored how hungry they reported being, and how much they ate, after two hours.

Therefore the participants ate much less beef than wholemeal pasta, but were more satisfied by the beef.

Plus the quote I gave above indicated protein was the better food group for satiety because - on the whole - foods high in protein that were satisfying had a better nutritional profile than foods high in carb or fat for the same calories.

[Deleted User]

Rightly or wrongly I stopped listening to the constant stream of continually reversed health advice some time ago. I use butter and also olive oil, I don't use lard but I do save bacon fat and use that. For years I was convinced that low fat/low sugar/ low calorie foods were going to slim me down and make me fitter but no matter how long I tried I'd lose a couple of stones and rapidly put them back on as soon as we 'drifted' away from that way of eating. Some 4 years ago now I stopped alcohol altogether when my dear Sister in law was diagnosed with diabetes as I felt that having a glass of wine when she couldn't was so unfair. The upshot of no alcohol was coming down from a size 24 to 18 in very short time and with no feeling of deprivation. We have a balanced diet much of which is home produced. I cook most things from scratch and our weight stays constant. Yes at a size 18 I'm 2 sizes bigger than I'd like but we recently had the MOT blood screening at the GP surgery and no cholesterol problems, no pre diabetes indicators and no other potential problems were thrown up for either of us.

I'm all in favour of the medical profession/government giving advice that will make us healthier and give us better lives but so often the studies that are done that lead to these 'advices' are not big enough or broad enough to give a true picture and sadly they are usually negated in a couple of weeks by yet another study that gives the exact opposite advice to the first one. I can remember in the paper there being a dire warning that drinking red wine was rendering you liable to cancer and the following week it was stated that if you didn't drink red wine you were at risk of heart problems.

What the truth of the debate is I do not know, I just think that common sense should be in there somewhere and that there is most likely no one size fits all solution to the question of fats and carbohydrate consumption.

GreyQueen

The difficulty with type 2 diabetes, as sufferers will be well-aware, is that it isn't like breaking a leg.

You don't have an accident and whammo! there you are as a type 2 diabetic, having been perfectly well before.

Lots of people are slipping insidiously but relentlessly towards type 2 diabetes and may well sustain serious damage to multiple organs and/ or complex metabolic processes before they are diagnosed. And those forms of damage are mostly permanant and irreversible.

Not presently having a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes doesn't mean that you won't have such a diagnosis next month, next year, next decade.

Since the route to type 2 diabetes is well-known, and not reserved solely for those who are heavy, it would be prudent for all people to be aware of it and to reduce their risk factors, and hope that they never become sufferers themselves.

***

BMI is a blunt instrument for diagnosing overweight and doesn't take account of what the weight is made of; some people have heavier bones, carry more muscle, some thin people are skinny-fat with dangerous visceral fat packing their internal organs, you can't easily say exactly how much a person should weigh.

I'm 5 ft 10 and large-framed. If my weight drops below 10.5 stones, I start to catch every darned germ going around. It seems to be a definate line in the sand for me, a level which it isn't prudent to go under. I also know women who are my height, or even an inch or two taller, who have very different bones; frail, gracile, ankles and wrists like twigs. They don't have eating disorders - some of them eat like blinking rugby players - they are just very very slender.

What is a suitable weight for these ladies is not a suitable weight for me, and vice versa. We should all apply commonsense.

At present, I am happily reducing my weight by 1.5-2 lb a week by eating a low-carb but extremely high veg diet. With the chief source of fat being extra-virgin olive oil and the odd avocado. I expect to be about a year getting rid of the overweight, which seems reasonable as I was several years acquiring it.:rotfl:

theoretica

GreyQueen wrote: »

BMI is a blunt instrument for diagnosing overweight and doesn't take account of what the weight is made of; some people have heavier bones, carry more muscle, some thin people are skinny-fat with dangerous visceral fat packing their internal organs, you can't easily say exactly how much a person should weigh.

That is very true. A better measure in some cases would be the right person simply looking. I suspect many people who use it are hiding behind BMI because they don't think 'you look too fat to me' would go down well.

GwylimT

OneLeggedPig wrote: »

The success of Dr Barnad and Dr Mcdougall's diabetes treatment diets are that they solve the blood sugar issue, rather than just avoiding it by not intaking sugar.

The study I posted earlier is an interesting read if you have time, and so are the free information resources on diabetes treatment from Dr Barnard. His patients and people who have followed his diet program have consistently had great results. He has some talks on Youtube and is very watchable.

But if what you are doing is helping you than obviously that's great, and I hope it continues to work for you.

How is having a dangerously high blood sugar level solving any problem?

OneLeggedPig

GwylimT wrote: »

How is having a dangerously high blood sugar level solving any problem?

You wouldn't have a dangerously high level. If you read the study I posted earlier, the patients following the plant-based 75% carbohydrate diet saw significant improvements in those areas.