Myths and your diet

Today, I will squash a few myths about saturated fat, and diets in general. Sorry if it is a bit longer than my normal posts.

Myth: Eating less will make you weigh less.
Eating less will not make you weigh less. It is an almost universally held belief that people who are overweight just need to eat less and/or do more. People look at you, and you can almost see the accusation in their eyes. Eat less!

Myth: Doing more will make you weigh less.
Doing more will not make you weigh less. Both the eating less and doing more beliefs make the massive and wrong assumption that the body is able to burn fat. The body can only burn fat when there is no glucose/glycogen available. Modern man rarely, if ever, allows his body to get to the state where it can burn its own fat – let alone will. Think about it: you lose your job, you don’t automatically dip into savings, you cut back on expenditure; the body does exactly the same.

Myth: Weight gain is the result of too many calories in
Weight gain is from fat being stored, not too many calories in. Equally, weight loss is about fat lost, not fewer calories in. The perfect way to store fat is to eat carbohydrates. It’s the carbs that count, not the calories.

Myth: Cholesterol will kill you
Cholesterol is life critical – not the bad guy in any way, shape or form. You would literally die without cholesterol. It is a key part of the structure for every cell in your body. Cholesterol is so vital that your body makes it, and cannot risk leaving it to chance that you would get it externally from somewhere. Statins stop the body from producing the cholesterol – they literally stop one of your fundamental body processes from being able to function. One in 500 people has familial hypercholesterolemia, and may have a problem clearing cholesterol in their body (rather like type 1 diabetics who can’t return blood glucose levels to normal). For anyone else to be actively trying to lower their vital and life-affirming cholesterol levels is deeply troubling.

Myth:
 You need to eat five-a-day fruit and veg
There is no basis for telling you to eat five-a-day. The pick-a-number-a-day campaign (it is not always five in each country) has spread across three continents and tens of countries. It has become the most well-known and promoted public health nutritional message ever. You would think, therefore, it was evidence-based and founded upon robust scientific knowledge. You would be wrong. Five-a-day is a marketing campaign with no evidence; it is fuelling the obesity epidemic, rather than helping in any way whatsoever. If parents knew what researchers such as Dr Robert Lustig and Dr Richard Johnson knew about fructose, they would never give their children fruit juice again.

Myth: Saturated fat causes heart disease
It does not. It has not been proven that saturated fat consumption causes heart disease. It also has not even been proven that there is a consistent association between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. It can't be proven, because there is no link. Saturated fat DOES NOT cause heart disease.

Myth: Fat clogs your arteries
Fat does not clog your arteries. Fat never clogs veins. By a process of common sense, therefore, fat also never clogs arteries. It is a reasonable assertion that fat is not even traveling freely in the blood stream. Fat and water don’t mix, so, since blood is effectively water, fat cannot travel freely around the blood system. Fat travels around in lipoproteins – along with cholesterol, protein and phospholipids. The idea that fat somehow leaps out of lipoproteins to attach itself to the arterial wall to try to clog up the system and kill you is ludicrous.

Myth: You must keep your blood sugar topped up, and eat little and often to achieve it
I don't know who said this first, but they ought to be shot. Every time you eat a carbohydrate, and your blood glucose levels rise, the body needs to release a substance called insulin (from the pancreas) to return your blood glucose levels to normal. Any “topping up” simply places a demand on the body to get the blood glucose levels back down again. This is now believed by many as one key reason for the explosion in type 2 diabetes – the body is asked to release insulin too much, too often and has no way of recognizing some of the foreign substances we consume in modern man-made food.


Myth: Butter is bad, man-made-margarine is good
Do you really, honestly think man knows how to feed us better than Mother Nature? Or, do you think there are huge profits to be made in manufactured, hydrogenated, Frankenfoods, and that’s why a campaign has been waged against real food encouraging you to eat fake food instead?

Myth: Fructose (fruit sugar) is good for dieters
It is bad for dieters, more likely to make them fat. Fructose, also known as fruit sugar, is being called the fattening carbohydrate in the world of obesity. It is uniquely metabolised by the liver, so it doesn’t get the chance to be used up as fuel in the blood stream – it goes straight to the liver where it can be turned into fat.

Myth: You must eat 25g to 30g of fibre per day
Here are two interesting facts about fibre:
1) Humans can’t digest fibre. So, how can something you can’t digest be so important for your health? and
2) Why on earth would you want to rush food through from the gut? The majority of nutritional absorption takes place in the small intestine, so why would you want to speed up this process, and disturb the nutrients being absorbed?
Don’t put nasty substances in the body (sugar and additives that accompany bran to make it palatable), and then you don’t need to rush nutritious, healthy food out of your digestive system.

Myth: Sedentary behaviour caused this obesity epidemic and exercise will cure it
Sedentary behaviour did not cause this obesity epidemic, and exercise won’t cure it. The UK government notes that exercise is only claimed to have a medium level of evidence for moderate preventative and therapeutic benefits for obesity – that is, the evidence is not strong for much benefit either as a prevention or a cure. Also, the idea that man is naturally active is another myth. Man is as evolutionarily disposed to being sedentary as to gathering food. What man would have done, and what we should do today, is natural activity – walk, talk, sing, dance, cook, clean and tend the land, not pump iron.

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Well, that's enough myths squashed for one week. On another note, I found a way to cheat the scale! But I doubt it will work for the rest of you. So, how did I do it? I took my water pills VERY early on Sunday morning. This caused me to get rid of quite a lot of excess water before we weighed. It just goes to show how big an effect holding back water can have on your weight.

My loss for the week came to a mighty 2.8 kg. The Wife lost a round 1 kg, while Eldest picked up 0.5 kg. Youngest lost 0.2 kg, and now have not picked up in any week since the start of the year. Good for her!

Remember, you can track our weight loss on the Weight Loss Totals page. Go have a look if you have not done so already!