You know I quit sugar, right? And you know I’ve stuck to it? And you know I’ve written an ebook on how to do it?
For those of you who haven’t read it yet, the main thrust of my 8-week program is replacing sugar with fat. It’s an approach I really find worked for me, and for many others. But I keep getting asked:
“is it really ok to eat fat?”
“how can you say saturated fat is OK?”
“how much fat do YOU eat?”
Alright. Let’s clear a few things up, then…
1. This short video sums up a fair bit of the misconception around saturated fat:
The gist is this: in the 1950s, a random scientist called Ancel Keys published a dodgy study that told us saturated fats were bad. The study was a total furphy. But we latched on to it. It’s important to realise that at that time the edible oil industry in the US seized the opportunity to promote its polyunsaturates. The industry did this by developing a health issue focusing on Key’s anti-saturated fat bias. With the help of the edible oil industry lobbying in the United States, federal government dietary goals and guidelines were adopted incorporating this mistaken idea that consumption of saturated fat was causing heart disease. This anti-saturated fat issue became the agenda of government and food industry groups around the world.
Me. I’m cool with saturated fat. I eat chicken skin. And butter. And coconut oil. All saturated. All good.
Now, a few thoughts that dictate my attitude to fat:
2. We aren’t what we eat, we are how we metabolise what we eat. The mantra we’ve been fed, though, is that fat must make us fat. Which is just not true. We are designed to metabolise fat efficiently. It’s sugars and starches we struggle with. Surely we can all accept our bodies are a little more sophisticated than this simple fat = fat equation??
3. Not all fats are equal. I outline the differences in my ebook. This much you need to know: trans fats are bad, so are most poly-unsaturated vegetable oils. Saturated fat is good! Seriously.
4. You can eat all the veggies in the world. But if you don’t eat them with fat, you’re not getting the full nutritional benefits. Many vitamins and minerals are fat soluble and need a knob of butter or drizzle of oil to be properly metabolised.
5. What about cholesterol? I’ll put it simply. Cholesterol (bad, good, HDL, LDL, whatever) is simply a bandaid (as well as being a critical molecule for hormone health and more). It circulates in our arteries patching up damage caused by the damage that sugar does. Yes sugar. So when we talk high cholesterol etc…cholesterol ain’t the problem. It’s the fix. Sugar and hypertension and toxins are the problem.
4. How much fat do I eat? I go through about 3 tbls of coconut oil a day (for cooking and also eating raw as a snack – I eat a tbl or two after lunch to satiate myself), a tbls of organic butter (on my vegetables), the fat and skin on all meat (and as a result I eat less meat overall…fat is what fills me up most efficiently) plus a good chunk of cheese, 1-2 eggs, 1/2 an avocado and a good drizzle of olive oil or macadamia oil most days.
My overall advice is to try eating more fat…and see what it does to cravings and appetite. For me, it’s totally curbed it. I think in part because when you let go of guilt and complicated rules, you can eat what you FEEL like. What do you think? Do you eat much fat? Have you got any ‘did you knows’ about fats?
