Understanding Fat

There's a lot of confusion that still surrounds the whole 'fat is bad' and 'fat makes you fat' mumbo jumbo. The point of this post is not to give you any information on how to lose fat, but rather to give you a better picture of the common misconceptions surrounding fat and it's role in the body.

I hope people are starting to drift away from the ideology that came out of the 80's that fat makes you fat. It was basically common knowledge back then that fat was the reason people would, well, get fat. So began the whole low fat craze and before you knew it every item of food (and even still today) was changed to low fat. This probably made people really happy because now they could enjoy their favorite food and not gain (and probably lose) weight. Right? Wrong. Fast forward a few years and somehow we ended up with obesity rates higher than they've ever been. But, but, if I eat low fat food, I won't get fat right......RIGHT!?!? Well, not really.

It seems a little counter intuitive to think that switching to low fat food would result in weight gain, but in Michael Pollan's 'In Defense of Food', we see that one of the biggest reasons obesity rates sky-rocketed as consumers began switching to low fat was because what they didn't know was that their food was being pumped with sugar and high fructose corn syrup, making them much more calorie dense (and unhealthy). Once everyone jumped onto the low fat bandwagon, they were under the impression that they could consume as much, if not more, of everything else because they were on a 'low fat diet', but unfortunately they didn't realize that those extra calories were what was keeping them fat.

In one article by Lyle McDonald which I'll make reference to at the end, he talks about one amazing study that was conducted where individuals were given low fat or regular yogurt and told to eat as much as they wanted. The group that was given the low fat yogurt ate more. Shocker. So is human nature; give someone something to eat and tell them it's low fat and without noticing they'll eat more of it because they feel like they're 'saving calories'. What they don't realize though is that they're making up for the lost fat calories (fat contains 9 calories per gram) by consuming either more of the product, or by consuming more of something else. It's interesting to notice how people justify their fast food meals by ordering a diet drink or whatever on the side because, well, it's 'diet'. Right. Ok. One of the things people would overcompensate on was carbohydrates (very briefly, when carbs are consumed they basically halt fat oxidation (burning) and any fat you're consuming gets stored).

'In Defense of Food' by Michael Pollan is a great book and goes into much more detail than what I wrote here.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/all-diets-work-the-importance-of-calories.html