Eat Fat, Lose Weight: Good Fats
How Butter and Cream Will Make You Healthy and Lean
Get thin, lower cholesterol, and avoid obesity and diabetes, by eating butter, cream, olive oil, and coconut oil and how margarine and canola oil will make you sick.
Eat Fat, Lose Weight: How Butter, Cream, Olive Oil, and Coconut Oil will make you healthy and lean
Lose weight, lower cholesterol, and avoid obesity and diabetes, by eating butter, cream, olive oil, and coconut oil and how margarine and canola oil will make you sick.
For the past century, Americans have been taught that the fats humans have healthily consumed for 30,000 years are evil and horribly unhealthy. Yet, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have dramatically increased alongside our use of margarine, shortening, and corn oil, introduced just one hundred years ago. Even as our world is still dominated by messages to eat lean meats and never eat butter, surprising new studies are coming out showing that a diet of skinless chicken and margarine leads to lowered immune systems, high cholesterol, diabetes, development problems, and a general state of unhealthiness.
The World Before 1900
Studies of native societies untouched by Western food are at the forefront of the debunking of the “low-fat myth”. A study of ancient hunter-gatherer societies by Bruce Watkins, professor and university faculty scholar at Purdue University and director of the Center for Enhancing Foods to Protect Health, and anthropologist Loren Cordain, professor of health and exercise science at Colorado State University and author of "The Paleo Diet", showed that conditions such as heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity and diabetes, were rare while fat intake was high compared to our standards.
"Previous studies by myself and colleagues had found that nearly all – 97 percent – of the world's hunter-gatherer societies would have exceeded recommended guidelines for fat," Cordain says.
"Generally, our modern diets, especially in the past 100 years, have changed to where we're consuming excess amounts of omega-6 fat. Omega-6 is found in high levels in many of the oil seed crops that we consume," Watkins says. "It's also found in the meat of the livestock that eat these grains, as this study shows."
We Need Fat
Simply put, fat maximizes our absorption of vitamins and nutrients. A diet without fat leads to rabbit starvation: without fat the body cannot digest food. Fat also serves as the first and strongest line of defense in our immune system.
Good Fat/Bad Fat: Traditional versus Industrial
Our forefathers enjoyed fresh eggs with butter for breakfast, lard sandwiches for lunch, and delicious cake made with cream, butter, and coconut oil for shortening for dessert. Heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity and diabetes were quite rare by today’s standards.
Yet, there were health problems. Around 1815, there was a dire health crisis: children were dying of infant diarrhea, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever. Industrious businessmen had found a great new way to provide milk to city residents. They opened dairies next to whiskey distilleries and fed the leftover mash to the cows. The sickly cows stood side-by-side on cement floors with open sores on their flanks from poor diet and horrible environment. The milk they made has sickly and thin, without cream, and the dairy owners added flour and paint to make it “better”. This was called slophouse milk and its health effects on humans were dire. By 1835, all the slophouses were closed, but modern industrial food was born.
Fat Made Simple
Drug and food companies have made eating a complicated, contrary chore. Thankfully, we know that traditional foods have kept us healthy for thousands of years. For instance, we know that Okinawans live very long lives on a diet of soy, vegetables, and fish. What this means, is that a diet with traditional, fermented soy products like tofu and soy sauce are excellent for you, while industrially produced soy milk and soy "meats" have no nutritional value and many health risks. For a complete list of good and bad fats, see below:
Bad Fats: Industrial
Fats (and meat) from factory-farmed cows, pigs, and chickens – The fat from grain-fed beef is full of omega-6 fat, with none of the powerful nutrients and omega-3 fat in grass-fed cows. Far more importantly, factory-farmed animals are kept in deplorable conditions, festering with disease and manure. Factory chicken is so feces-ridden that chicken breasts are bleached (delicious!) Moreover, America still allows cows to be fed cow by-products, and hardly screens for mad cow disease, which makes the risk of getting mad cow disease not insignificant.
Margarine – The home of trans fat; pure poison.
Cream or milk from factory-farmed cow – Milk comes from sick cows, heavily dosed with antibiotics and growth hormone, and then processed beyond recognition.
Corn, canola, and sunflower oils – Heat ruins these oils, making them rancid and awful for humans (one example is trans fat). Modern oils are heated, bleached, washed with detergent, and deodorized.
“Pure” or non-virgin olive oil – Hot processed, then bleached and deodorized, it loses almost all of its antioxidants and polyphenols.
Good Fats: Traditional
Fat from organic/humanely raised animals – These fats are rich in nutrients and Omega-3 fat. Fat aids in the processing of animal proteins, saturated fat in particular, aids in the absorption of calcium. Skinless chicken is a woefully incomplete meal, lacking in basic nutrition.
Cream, milk, and butter from grass-fed cows – A powerful source of vitamins, nutrients, and Omega-3 fat.
Virgin or Extra-virgin, cold pressed olive oil – Olives are simply pressed to squeeze out the oil, without heat and chemicals. Polyphenols in olive oil prevent heart disease and cancer.
Coconut oil – stable when heated, excellent in baking. Coconut oil’s reputation suffered significantly when domestic seed oil companies paid experts to assert that saturated fats were “bad” and their rancid oil was “healthy”. It’s incredibly rich in Lauric Acid. It also aids in weight loss.
Still not convinced?
In 2006, the Women’s Health Care Initiative published the results of its eight-year trial. One group of women was fed the U.S. government’s recommended fat intake: 20 percent of total calories can come from fat. The second group ate a diet with 37 percent fat. The WHI found that the low fat group’s diet did not prevent weight gain, heart disease, stroke, or cancer.
For more information, the author highly recommends reading Real Food by Nina Planck.
