Fat and Eggs are Good for You (Again)

Everything goes in circles. If there is one thing you can be sure of in life: Everything Goes in Circles. EVERYTHING. All that changes is the size of the circles.

When I was a teenager one of the big danger foods was eggs. From what remains in my impressionable memory—from those times—it seemed to me that back in those days eggs were worse than smoking. I can recall advertising in papers saying limit your eggs intake to two a week; or die. Or something along those lines anyway.

And then about about 20 years ago saturated animal fats got close to becoming eating enemy number one.

Since I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes one of the things I have been told is to eat more of is eggs. I need to get my good cholesterol up. It is way too low. And increasing my egg intake seems to be one of the strategies in getting those good cholesterol levels up.

Turns out that the cholesterol in eggs is good cholesterol and it also turns out that the levels of bad cholesterol really don’t matter that much at all. But what does matter a huge amount are the levels of good cholesterol. If you have low levels of good cholesterol the chances of heart disease skyrocket. In fact doctors now know that low good cholesterol levels practically guarantee heart disease. If you have high levels of good cholesterol the chances of heart disease plummet. And, as I mentioned before, the levels of bad cholesterol are of little or no consequence when compared to the impact the levels of good cholesterol will have in relation to heart disease. Also, as it happens, there are two types of bad cholesterol, and only one of them is actually “bad-ish”.

Since being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes I have had diet consulting from the diabetes consultant in the hospital (and he was a very grumpy type), at the out-patient clinic, and by my local GP. All have said to increase the number of eggs I eat with one suggesting two eggs a day would be a good target. The beauty of eggs is that they are basically carb free and contain almost everything else your body needs including a small dose of life-extending good cholesterol.

And now to fat. More and more now I am reading that fat is not the super bad food we thought it was. Turns out that fat does not create fat—as has been thought over the last 30 or so years. In fact, by and large, eating fat can actually causes your body to burn fat—depending what else you eat with it.

All those years of cutting any visible fat off my steaks, T-bones, and pork chops, and taking the skin of my chicken, was not only a waste of time, it probably contributed to me putting on weight—again, depending on what I consumed at the same time.

It seems that the real enemy are carbohydrates in its three primary forms: sugar, food starch, and carbs. There is lot more to it than this but to seriously oversimplify it, if you consume carbs (in any of the various forms) then your body gets a chemical signal to store calories. Don’t burn them. Store them!

If you don’t eat carbs your body does not get the signal to store calories as fat, or the signal is much weaker. If you ate a whole buffalo over a period of a week, fat and all, your body would store less fat than if you ate a loaf of bread a day. Why? In eating a buffalo you body does not get signalled to store as much as it can as fat. When eating bread (carbohydrates) it does.

While I found the above items in a posting at Green Planet (here), as it happens I am currently re-reading a book on this very subject. It is called “Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes. If you are interested then this is the link to the book at Amazon.

Taubes’ book describes and considers the very new thinking that insulin is the governor of when or if we burn, store, or eject excess calories and it has nothing to do with how many calories we eat. The catchcry of the last 30 years of “Calories In, Calories Out” as false.

I will post some thought about “Why We Get Fat” when I have finished my re-read.

I will say that in his recommended body-fat burning breakfast at the end of the book Taubes suggests hearty helpings of sausages, eggs, and bacon (but no toast or hash browns).