Is it Carbs and Sugar or Fat Making You Fat?

If you look at any typical food pyramid, it’s all wrong. In fact, though the scientific establishment has spent several decades demonizing dietary fat¹, we’ve all been misled. The truth is that refined sugar and processed carbohydrates have made us fat – not fat.

The Big Fat LieThe press didn’t help. They published article after article telling us that fat would clog our arteries and cause heart disease. Food products started to be labeled “No FAT!” or “LOW FAT” with indiscriminate glee by manufacturing companies. You could call it all a BIG FAT LIE² though.

This all started with something called the “lipid hypothesis” started by Ancel Keys³ in the 1950s. He suggested that we reduce saturated fat to “prevent” heart disease. More recently, food manufacturing companies picked up on the health scare tactics and said that if we ate too much fat, we’d get fat ourselves. Even the American Heart Association chimed in. In a press release⁴, they stated,

“The American Heart Association continues to recommend replacing saturated fats with poly- and mono-unsaturated vegetable oil to help prevent heart disease, according to a new American Heart Association advisory, published in the association’s journal Circulation.”

Just so you know what’s really going on, the AHA is also deeply supported by pharmaceutical companies⁵ that want to push statin drugs⁶, which have recently been linked to a whole host of health concerns. Most recently, Harvard doctors⁷ started to challenge the statin use guidelines⁸ published by the FDA, and other organizations.

What’s even more eye-opening is that the statin industry⁹ is one of the most lucrative drug classes in the history of pharmacological medicine.

Pharmaceutical giants Pfizer¹⁰, Merck Sharp & Dohme¹¹  and AstraZeneca¹² have made millions off of them.

Pfizer’s Lipitor is the most profitable drug in the history of medicine.  At its peak in 2006¹³, yearly revenue for Lipitor exceeded $US12 billion.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Perhaps there’s a different truth about fat we should be looking at.

What Really Happens When You Eat FatHere’s what happens when you don’t eat healthy fats (even saturated fats) that appear in foods like nuts, avocados, chia seeds, coconuts, ghee, hemp seeds, Extra Virgin Olive oil, camelina oil, etc. and lots of carbohydrates: you will hold onto water and salt which can increase your blood pressure. This will cause your liver to push LDLs and VLDLs instead of HDLs which leads to “bad” or imbalanced cholesterol levels.

This then creates thick artery walls, which become more prone to microtearing, which attracts even more sticky cholesterol to the site because your body is trying to repair those tears¹⁴.

Your arteries then become chronically inflamed. It’s like being under constant duress or having a cut that won’t stop bleeding. All your body’s resources will go to stop the bleeding so that you don’t die.

Chronic inflammation not only messes with your immunity, but it can cause all kinds of other health problems, too.

Here’s What Happens When You Eat Lots of Carbs and SugarWhen you eat cake, bread, pasta, rice, wheat, or fruit juices, as well as high fructose corn syrup or the many other forms of sugar that are hidden in most packaged foods, they are quickly converted to glucose by your liver.

This makes your blood sugar rise, and insulin goes nuts. This is your fat-storing hormone – insulin. Do you understand that correlation? Every time your insulin levels. ¹⁵ are whack, your body stores fat in an attempt to regulate them.

When insulin levels are high, you are storing fat. When you eat lots of empty calories found in highly processed carbs and sugar, you want to eat more of them, as they also alter hormones like ghrelin¹⁶ that stimulates your appetite.

Leptin¹⁷ is also affected which tells you when you are full. It is produced by fat cells and tells your brain, via the hypothalamus, to stop eating because enough fat is stored to make sure you aren’t going to wither away into an emaciated skeleton.

Sugar also makes you crave more salty foods¹⁸, which then make you crave more sugar, and you’re now in a psychotic bad-food habit¹⁹ that is really hard to extricate yourself from.

So, who is really the bad guy here?

The Benefits of Saturated FatYou should be afraid of eating too much sugar and carbohydrates. Don’t fall for the sugar industry’s trick of displacing blame²⁰ for the obesity epidemic in America.

The only fat that is truly evil is processed trans-fat²¹. The weird stuff the food industry came up with a lab to try to prolong the shelf life of processed foods and make it more addictive.

Though fat may have more calories, it also actual full of nutrition. Saturated fat offers some great benefits, including:

• Fat (especially combined with fiber) helps you feel fuller longer, so you won’t tend to overeat.
• Healthy fats (not trans-fats) are food for your brain²², and increase cognitive function and memory.
• Fats boost cardiovascular health by regulating lipid levels.
• Saturated fat helps your body incorporate calcium for stronger bones.
• Without good fats, the immune system can’t recognize foreign pathogens and fight disease as effectively.
• Certain saturated fats are signaling messengers²³. They are needed throughout the body so that cells can communicate effectively.

The takeaway is that fat is good²⁴. It’s sugar and carbs that are destroying your health and making you both sick and fat. Take notice and add more healthy fats to your diet today.

Try cooking with healthy fats, adding them to smoothies, putting chia seeds in your salads, or adding nuts to your favorite dishes. Coconut oil can be used everywhere – even on your body! It is also antibacterial and antimicrobial, naturally.

All those saturated fats are feeding your body in important ways, contributing to your overall nutrient density, and keeping you healthy and happy. Go FAT!

References:

1. Peregrine Nutrition. Bad Science: How We Came to Demonize Saturated Fat. https://peregrinenutrition.com/blogs/peregrinations/bad-science-how-the-food-pyramid-is-killing-america
2. The Health Loft. (2018, January 8) 8 Reasons Your Doctor is Dead Wrong About Fat. https://www.thehealthloft.ca/8-reasons-doctor-dead-wrong-fat/
3. Wikipedia. Lipid Hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis
4. American Heart Association (2017, June 15). Replacing saturated fat with healthier fat may lower cholesterol as well as drugs in context of a healthy diet. http://newsroom.heart.org/news/replacing-saturated-fat-with-healthier-fat-may-lower-cholesterol-as-well-as-drugs-in-context-of-a-healthy-diet?utm_campaign=sciencenews16-17&utm_source=science-news&utm_medium=phd-link&utm_content=phd06-15-17
5. Nedelman, M. (2018, January 1). CNN Health. Should you take statins? Guidelines offer different answers. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/18/health/statins-guidelines-conflict-study/index.html?no-st=1539591263
6. Rosenherg, M. (2013, December 16). Hufftington Post. The American Heart Association- Protecting Industry Not Patients. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-rosenberg/health-news_b_4398304.html
7. Harvard Men’s Health Watch. (2017, April). The new state of statins. https://www.health.harvard.edu/drugs-and-medications/the-new-state-of-statins
8. Thompson, D. (2013, November 18). Health Day. Some Doctors Challenge New Statin Guidelines. https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/doctor-news-206/some-doctors-challenge-new-statin-guidelines-682290.html
9. West, M. (2018, January 22). Statin Wards: secrecy and the world’s most lucrative drugs. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/statin-wars-secrecy-and-the-worlds-most-lucrative-drugs/
10. West, M. (2017, August 7). Bottom of the canal: Pfizer’s billion-dollar tax rort. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/pfizers-billion-dollar-sham-audited-by-kpmg/
11. Merck, Sharp & Dohme. https://www.msd-australia.com.au/home/
12. AstraZeneca. https://www.astrazeneca.com.au/
13. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/254341/pfizers-worldwide-viagra-revenues-since-2003/
14. The Health Loft. (2018, January 8). 8 Reasons Your Doctor is Dead Wrong About Fat. https://www.thehealthloft.ca/8-reasons-doctor-dead-wrong-fat/
15. Matthews, M. Muscle for Life. How Insulin Really Works: It Causes Fat Storage… But Doesn’t Make You Fat. https://www.muscleforlife.com/how-insulin-works/
16. Your Hormones. Ghrelin. http://www.yourhormones.info/hormones/ghrelin/
17. Leveque, K. (2017, May 18). “Hunger Hormones” Are a Thing, and Yes, You Can Control Them. https://thethirty.byrdie.com/hunger-hormones
18. Nutritious Life. 4 Reasons Why You Have Sugar Cravings. https://nutritiouslife.com/eat-empowered/3-ways-to-conquer-nighttime-munchies/
19. Patel, A. (2016, January 29). Huffington Post. What Salt and Sugar Food Cravings Actually Mean. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/01/29/stop-food-cravings_n_9089998.html
20. Brodwin, E. (2016, September 13). Business Insider. Why I’m Livid – but not surprised that the US sugar industry funded one of the biggest misconception in modern nutrition. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-american-sugar-industry-convinced-people-fat-was-bad-2016-9
21. Heart.org. Trans Fats. http://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/trans-fat
22. the Model Health. Benefits of Saturated Fat (Yep, You Read That Right!) https://theshawnstevensonmodel.com/benefits-of-saturated-fat/
23. Wikipedia. Lipid Signaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_signaling
24. Mercola (2016, April 25). Saturated Fat Finally Vindicated in Long Buried Study.