Looks like fats are good for you again
Bacon and eggs could be back—big time.
So it turns out that after 35 to 40 years of telling us that fats were seriously bad for us that the experts were probably wrong. If the current finding are right; not just a bit wrong but completely and totally wrong. The latest is that fats don't make you fat and fats are not as bad as suspected for the heart and arteries. In fact it turns out that the heart and circulatory system require fats, including those dreaded saturated fats, to keep them in good working condition.
If you have been following the popular press you would have been seeing numerous reports coming through that the experts had the fat thing all wrong. ABC's Catalyst even ran an entire episode on this topic and it was so popular it was repeated.
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This "fats aren't as bad as we thought" thing won't come as a total surprise to long time readers of this blog. Back in 2011 I posted my blog titled "Insulin makes us fat" (here) which attempted to summarise the Gary Taubes book about fat and carbohydrates, and the effect of body levels of insulin on when fat gets stored by the body.
The new findings are that the toxic fatty acids in the body are caused by carbohydrates and not by consumed fats. Also it is carbohydrates that cause the body to store energy as fat, not the consumption of fat itself—because carbohydrates cause insulin to spike and not sugar or fats.
As I pointed out in my posting it all comes down to insulin levels. High insulin levels force the body to store all it can as fat. Low insulin levels cause the body not to store fat. What makes insulin levels go high? Carbohydrates.
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So the new weight reduction idea goes something like this: Eat all the non-carbohydrate food you like including fat and saturated fats, and any body fat storage will be close to nil; but eat carbs with a meal or by themselves and insulin levels will spike and then everything gets turned to fat because that is what high insulin levels cause the body do—apparently. Interestingly it seems that sugar alone does not cause insulin levels to spike.
Barry.