GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH

 

MORE RECIPES TO COME

So what actually constituted a “high-fat” diet back in the 1800s until the 1940s?  Basically butter, eggs, nuts and animal fats such as lard and beef tallow. Margarines, which were introduced in the 1860s, were butter substitutes made with animal fats such as lard and tallow or the saturated vegetable oils from coconut oil and palm oils. These high-fat diets, considered then to be healthy, were rich in saturated fats, today seen by many as the worst possible fat one can consume. However, drastically reducing saturated fats from the modern diet has not solved any health problems, and statistics show that obesity rates are at an all-time high. The low-fat advice is losing credibility.

Fats and oils are technically known as “lipids.” If a lipid is liquid at room temperature, it is called an “oil.” If it is solid, it is called a “fat.” Fats can be found in many food sources in nature: animal meats (such as tallow and lard), marine animals (fish oil), vegetables and fruits (such as olives, avocados, coconuts, etc.), nuts and seeds/legumes (soybeans, sesame seeds, peanuts, cashews, grape seeds, etc.), and whole grains (wheat, rice, etc. – must contain the bran and all components to benefit from all the oils present). A diet rich in natural foods will be a naturally high-fat diet! It is virtually impossible to eliminate fats from our diet. And we wouldn’t want to! Fats are an essential part of life. Without them, we could not survive.

Four vitamins—A. D, E, and K—are soluble in fat; fat carries fat-soluble vitamins.  When fat is removed from a food, many of the fat-soluble compounds are also removed. 

Fat also adds satiety to our meal—a feeling of having had enough to eat.  Fat-free and low-fat foods are one of the reasons some people over-eat carbohydrates, which really packs on the pounds. They just don’t feel like they’ve had enough to eat, even when the volume has been more than enough.

Low-Carb Diets: Half the Story

Gary Taubes wrote a startling article in the New York Times in 2002 titled “What If it Were All a Big Fat Lie!”  In it he stated:

The cause of obesity [is] precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid — the pasta, rice and bread — that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then add on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.

Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message ”and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.”⁴

This started the current low-carb tidal wave because people generally have found that it is true: if you cut out refined carbohydrates you will lose weight.

But while these new low-carb diets are now challenging the low-fat hypothesis, there still seems to be mass confusion as to which fats and oils are actually healthy, and which ones are not. And no wonder. Probably no other food group has been politicized more in American nutrition than fats. With all the books and literature written on the subject, and each one practically contradicting each other, there is really only one book written by a lipid expert with no commercial ties to anyone in the edible oil industry. That book is “Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol” by Dr. Mary Enig, a nutritionist/biochemist with her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Maryland. Much of her work is featured in the Weston Price Foundation that studies traditional foods.

Let’s face it. The low-fat dietary dictum is a multi-billion dollar industry built upon a foundation of sinking sand. Not only does the scientific research show that the polyunsaturated vegetable oils promote weight gain, it also shows that they are not good as an animal feed either. While they do promote weight gain in livestock, they do so at the expense of another essential fatty acid: conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).  CLA is found primarily in beef and dairy products, and cannot be produced in the human body. Research has shown that animals grazed strictly on grass, their natural diet, can have levels of CLA hundreds of times higher than animals raised on grain feeds. Also, in a study done by the Department of Animal Science at Southern Illinois University in 2003, it was found that beef finished off on soybean oil directly reduced the amount of CLA produced by ruminant animals.⁵ What are the known benefits of CLA, now that we have almost lost it from our meat and dairy sources? Among its benefits are: it destroys cancer cells, it reduces tumors, and it promotes weight loss while increasing muscle growth.

So while many people are seeing weight loss on low-carb diets because they are cutting back on refined carbohydrates, many do not see weight loss because they are still lacking proper fats in their diet, and most of the popular low-carb diets are giving mixed messages about which fats are healthy and which ones are not. If you choose the wrong fat and consume large quantities of it, such as hydrogenated polyunsaturated fats full of trans fatty acids, not only will you not have much success in losing weight, you will probably develop a whole host of other health problems.

http://www.coconut-info.com/weight-loss.htm

 Breakfast for two for the week.

 On sunday cook the sausages and make a batch of home made tomato or pasta sauce using canned diced tomotoes, veg., herbs, sea salt & pepper.

Every morning throw two big hand fulls or more of chopped greens into a hot pan with a few spoons fulls of tomato sauce and a sausage off to the side, heat until greens are wilted and warm. Put everything on a plate and quickly fry eggs in the hot pan.

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Eating with the seasons is great way to eat healthy. Your food is local and therefore is picked when ripe and highest in nutrients. Why eat food that has been picked before its even close to being ripe and travelled thousands of miles by plane and truck when you can support your local farmers and economy. I’ve been eating a lot of zucchinni lately from the market and from friends.

Above are two easy dishes of quartered and thinly sliced sauted zucchinni with eggs at breakfast and chicken at lunch. Quick and healthy. For dinner I will take a larger one and cut in half length wise, scoop out seeds, season with sea salt, pepper and dried herbs and roast in the oven skin side up in a 1/4 inch of water until soft.

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