"Fat makes you fat" debate.

I have recently had a lunch meeting with a perspective new business partner who wanted to share some ideas with me about a new product he was planning to put on the market. We sat down in this restaurant and after a few minutes we ordered food. Our orders were as different as night and day. Mine was a chicken salad with avocado, a very balanced and filling meal. He ordered stake with extra butter on the side and nothing else. I tried to keep my question to myself, but my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him about his order. His response? “Carbs make you fat. Everyone knows that.” For a second there I was dumbfounded.

Every generation has their own hype about food and weight loss. I guess our generation pulled the shortest straw in this department. We were raised to believe that fat makes you fat, what with all the low fat or even zero percent fat foods in our supermarkets. We have low fat cheese, milk, meat products, beverages and well… you can get everything in a low fat option nowadays.

In my weight loss journey I was a victim of sorts of this idea and I’ve even experimented with some “no fat” diets. I did achieve some success and but mid way through I gained every kilo back, and then some! I have never been fatter in my life! And I guess that most of the people, who tried this kind of regimen had the exact same experience.

Then came the great fear of carbohydrates or carbs in short. Everybody and their mothers got on this train and we are beginning to see a great rise in low carb or even zero carb foods (which can be seen in almost every health magazine, usually next to someone with a perfect figure).

And this all had me thinking about why do we continue to believe, like food, or more specifically, a single nutrient in food is the greatest enemy in our diets. I mean, have we forgotten that a balanced diet is all that we need to be healthy and that we won’t be healthy if we take out even one single nutrient from our food? I mean, first it was the fat, now it’s carbohydrates, well then next on the chopping block must be protein, right?

But I can understand why fat and carbohydrates became the scapegoats of our poor nutrition. If you can, just for a moment, put all of your knowledge about nutrition in a box and throw it in a corner, and really get into the mindset of the people living in the seventies, you’ll see what I mean. Food is abundant and more and more people are spending less and less time being active and more time in front of their TV sets. Imagine If you are bombarded from everywhere that all fats cause a number of different diseases like coronary problems, hypertension or even a higher risk of a stroke. And on the other hand you have some skinny model telling you, that the fat in all of the food is causing your body to store extra fat, of course you are going to believe it.

The same goes with the great fear of carbohydrates. This one came a bit later, after more research was done and we saw that not all fat was bad fat (actually, there are only 2 types of fat that are bad for you and those are trans fat and the bad cholesterol, but more on that in another post) and more and more people on low fat diets got heavier and heavier, so people needed someone else to blame. The best and safest bet was to turn their attention to carbohydrates, which they could find everywhere in great abundance. Not to mention the implementation of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in, well, everything. On top of that, we have artificial sweeteners, excitotoxins and all other kind of crap in our food, that makes it taste good, but it wrecks havoc in our bodies.

Thankfully, because of the further research in the field of nutrition we know that not all carbs are bad for you. Just like fat we have good carbs, bad carbs and deadly carbs, but I’ll explain more on that in another post.

Fat does not make you fat and neither do carbs. Excess calories and a sedentary lifestyle make you fat. Don’t blame a single nutrient, which is in every natural food on the planet, on your excess kilos. Take some responsibility and really think for yourself.

When in doubt you can always ask yourself this: Were our ancestors ever overweight or obese during their hunting-gathering days?

Until next time, stay strong and be kind.

Picture taken from: http://tiny.cc/tg11hw