I have always read that too much fat is bad for you.
Can people thrive on a low fat diet? How low?
If you are thin and healthy, will eating a lot of fat give you more of a chance of health problems?
No simple answer to that question. Depends on the kind of fat and how your body metabolizes it. Some vitamins are soluble in fat. As for the healthy skinny person what is the count of blood fats? HDL and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides?
Children cannot thrive on a low fat diet. Fat is needed for Brain development. Adults can live on low fat diets, and indeed if they have their gall ballders remove, must. Some fat is reccommended in a healthy diet.
As posted, the body needs some fat. Recent studies indicate that fat has been wrongly maligned. Does fat really cause arteriosclerosis and/or heat disease? Recent studies don’t indicate this.
You must realize there are four kinds of fats: saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and transfats. Recent studies indicate that only transfats are deleterious to your health, which means butter is better for you than margarine, despite articles to the contrary. As you probably know, mono- and poly- unsaturated fats are actually beneficial to your health. Total calories, however, count.
People who eat low fat foods tend to lose a few pounds after they stop:)
barb, I read that awhile ago by the writers of Fit For Life.
Butter, being a “natural” product, is better, although best used in moderation; do NOT go out and eat one whole stick of butter!
Covert Bailey, the author of Fit or Fat, has a few TV specials that broadcast on Public Television, usually during fundraising. He was talking about a woman who put honey on all of her food, claiming that the calories weren’t a problem because “Honey is natural”.
His response, “So’s syphilis.”
barbitu8 wrote:
Weeellllll … that ain’t what I heard about “transfats”.
All fat molecules consist of a glycerol base, bonded to three fatty acids. A fatty acid is a long-chain carbon compound, and contributes most of the material in a fat molecule (the glycerol is tiny and practically negligible). When all of the carbon atoms in a fatty acid chain are single-bonded to one another, it is said to be “saturated.” If, on the other hand, at least one adjacent pair of carbon atoms shares a double-bond, the fatty acid is said to be “unsaturated.”
The thing is, there are two types of double bond: the “cis” double bond, and the “trans” double bond. The “cis” double bond occurs in unsaturated fats found in nature, such as vegetable oil. It is a very weak bond, much weaker than the single-bonds formed between most of the carbon atoms in the fatty acid chain. This means the human digestive system can break this bond very easily, allowing it to digest the “cis-fatty acid” from two directions at once. The “trans” double bond is created during the hydrogenation process of making vegetable shortening. A “trans” double bond is much stronger than a “cis” double bond – almost as strong as a normal single-bond. The human digestive system cannot break a “trans” bond the way it can break a “cis” bond, and thus must digest the “trans-fatty acid” the same way it digests a saturated fatty acid.
The problem can be summed up as follows:[ul][li]The American Heart Association recommends that no more than 30% of your calories come from fat of any kind.[/li][li]The American Heart Association recommends that no more than 10% of your calories come from saturated fat.[/li][li]Fats containing trans-fatty acids (“transfats”) are nutritionally equivalent to saturated fats.[/li][li]But they’re listed as unsaturated fats on food labels.[/ul][/li]Incidentally, I haven’t heard of any ill health effects from transfats that are any worse than the effects of saturated fats. D’you have a cite to those recent studies?
I have to interject here…this is completely untrue. While the gallbladder’s primary fuction is to store and concentrate bile (bile is used to digest fat), it doesn’t actually make bile. That’s the liver’s job. If the gallbladder is removed, the liver merely secretes bile directly into the digestive system. Fat is still able to be digested normally.
I had my gallbladder out over 4 years ago. At no point did any of my doctors advise me that I should alter my fat intake whatsoever. In fact, I have been on a low-carb diet for the past 11 months, and I regularly eat approximately 60% of my calories from fat every day. I have never felt better in my life.
As for the assertion that fat is bad for you and the implication that we should all try to eat as low-fat as possible, I’ll just offer up this link to an article called The World’s Biggest Fad Diet.
Another interesting link that discusses the origins of the notion that animal fat was bad for us (i.e. the agriculture industry) is called The Oiling Of America
HTH 
Jadis wrote:
Then again, this article was published in Nexus New Times Magazine, alongside (ahem) “well-researched and unbiased” articles that praised an 18th century perpetual motion machine and claimed an Army Special Forces officer met some space aliens in Vietnam.
And this automatically invalidates the information contained therein? Maybe this interview with the principal contributer to the Oiling Of America article will hold up better, considering that it resides on Solgar’s website, which is a considerably more mainstream corporation. Feh. :rolleyes:
Ah, Solgar. Full name: The Solgar Vitamin and Herb company. Vendors of the “Wellness Bar”. Champions of “all-natural” nutrition.
Of course, such a company would never think of publishing an article that jumped to questionable conclusions about trans-fatty acids. Why, here’s a *completely sound, scientific, unbiased passage from the article in question:
Nope, no unfounded ranting or raving there. And certainly no appeals to the old saw of how everything natural is automatically better. :rolleyes:
Try http://www.medscape.com/reuters/prof/2001/03/03.09/20010308epid006.html
Just because it is digested the same way, doesn’t mean it has the same effect in the body.
Sorry, but this gets a giant “HUH”? I must have missed the hysterical ranting and raving you tried to point out in the portion quoted. You can nitpick the presentation of the information to your heart’s content…it was an interview for god’s sake, not a scientific journal. If you don’t agree with the researcher’s conclusions, fine…point out to me where they’re factually incorrect. Continuing to poke fun at the sites that choose to present the information is, IMO, weak. Tell me…what site sponser would you consider credible? I’m more than willing to hit google up for every website that carries this woman’s research if it will make you happy.
barbitu8 wrote:
I can’t. That website requires me to be a registered user of their system in order to view it.
I did find this FDA webpage, however:
http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/qatrans.html
Jadis wrote:
Let’s see … calling margarine “funny food” … claiming that such foods shouldn’t even be classified as “real” like whole foods are (whatever the heck a “whole” food is supposed to be) … insisting, with an exclamation point, that hydrogenation destroys some mysterious multitude of nutritional value that vegetable oil is implied to possess. That just spans the four sentences I quoted.
Which is part of the problem. I pointed out that the Oiling of America article you linked to came from a questionable source, and you attempted to back up the veracity of Mary Enig, the article’s principal author, with … a link to an interview, not a scientific journal.
Have Mary Enig’s theories not been published in a scientific journal? If so, which ones, and when? If not, why not? Did she not try to publish in a scientific journal? Did she try, but her article failed to meet the journal’s standards for evidence, or get shredded in the peer review process? I know from the Oiling of America article that she did her doctoral dissertation on the possibility that transfats interfere with anti-carcinogen enzymes, but dissertations are not subject to the same degree of peer scrutiny that articles published in peer-reviewed journals are.
Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on biochemistry. However, I’ll bet you there are a heck of a lot of people out there that are. What have “mainstream” biochemists said about Enig’s work? Anything at all? I see a lot of thinly-veiled allegations of Conspiracies of Silence in the Oiling of America article, particularly in part 2, but I somehow doubt I’m getting the whole picture.
And those two information sources didn’t raise any red flags with you?
If any of them are a half-decent scientific journal, then sure. But considering the unmistakable “conspiracy theory” tone which the Oiling of America article presented, I have a feeling you might not find any.
Look, its very simple.
Eat healthy and ‘as natural as you can get’ food.
Fresh fruit,veg,fish - some meat.
There is no money in telling people this so every now and then someone comes out with a ‘super’ new fad diet.
You do need some fat in your diet, just like everything else.
You also need some exercise in your life, some fun, etc.
All things in moderation - as the original dude said.
When was the last time you saw a bird going into mcdonalds or eating fries ?
14 million years of evolution to do what - fill our faces with mcdonalds and chips.
sigh…
oh well,
dude wrote:
When was the last time you saw a bird living to the age of 85?
OK, Tracer, here’s the first paragraph in that link:
BTW, anyone can register to Medscape. Just go to the homepage (www.medscape.com) and follow the instructions. It’s free.
Yes, I know that articles persistently state that margarine is better than butter. However, recent studies indicate that that may not be the case. It is not black and white.