Is It Safe To Eat So Much Fat?
Is It Safe To Eat So Much Fat?
In a word, yes. Saturated fat? Yes.
What? Doesn’ t that go against what doctors, nutritionists, and the government tell you? Yes, it does. Ask yourself:“ Has the advice to lower intake of fat resulted in a healthy population?” No way. In fact, the rise in obesity and diabetes coincides with the onset of the low-fat movement that took full swing in the 80s.
Most of what we believe about fat being dangerous comes from a single man: Ancel Keys. Keys had a hypothesis that consuming fat caused heart disease. It’ s easy to understand. Just like sugar ends up in your blood, so must fat. Turns out he was wrong. The fat in our blood is made by the liver from sugar. It’ s the sugar in your diet that get turned into the fat that circulates in your blood, otherwise known as triglycerides.
Keys was a very persuasive man, however. He performed now-refuted and very much flawed observational studies. In one study, the 7 Countries Study, he found a correlation between intake of saturated fat and an increased rate of heart disease. However, he cherry picked his 7 countries from a list of over 20, only selecting the countries where his correlation was seen. Data from Italy and Japan where rates of Sugar were also recorded that showed that a correlation could have just as easily been made for sugar, but Keys refused to. Countries who did not fit his hypothesis became known as paradoxes- The French paradox being that the French who eat some of the highest levels of saturated fat in the world have low rates of Heart disease, as do the Swiss. The Russian Mortality Paradox is another. They eat some of the lowest levels of saturated fat and, have a high incidence of mortality from heart disease.
Consider the Inuit – or“ Eskimo” people in the Arctic. They subsist on fish, seal meat, whale meat, and blubber. They give the lean meats to the dogs. No heart disease. Consider the Maasai in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania. They eat nothing but meat, fat, milk, and blood. No heart disease. Clearly, Ancel Keys was wrong. Yet, in 1977 Keys and his cronies were able to convince the USDA to adopt the dietary guidelines still in effect today.
In her book,“ The Big Fat Surprise,” named best science book of 2014 by The Economist, journalist Nina Teicholz( TIE-shulz) uncovers a myriad of randomized controlled trials – the holy grail of scientific studies – that show absolutely no correlation between the intake of saturated( or other) fat and heart disease. In 2014, a review of 76 observational and RCTs with more than 650,000 participants found that those with a high saturated fat intake did not have an increased risk of heart disease. 76 studies! No proof!
The combination of eating a high carbohydrate and a high fat diet is clear. Your insulin is high. Fat is denser than carbs, calorie wise. All the fat you eat gets stored, but only because of the carbs which raise insulin. Sure, that’ s dangerous. However, take away the carbs and your body can burn the fat for fuel.
That leaves us with a paradox. If you want to lose weight, eat a bacon double cheeseburger with extra cheese and bacon, even mayo. Just ditch the bun. It doesn’ t sound healthy, but in fact it is.
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