Why Eating Low-Fat Food Products is the Wrong Way to Achieve Health Goals
We’re overthinking it.
I’ll try to make this short, but not sweet. You’ll be more satisfied this way, and there needn’t be any guilt.
Everyone wants to be well, feel good and maybe even look better. There are conflicting approaches and everyone hopes they are onto the right one.
Most of the nutrition information that we hear of comes from the news, social media and commercials. We sometimes find ourselves following programs that only work for the company selling the products at their heart.
When it comes to fat we can look to the habits of our ancestors to see what works for us.
We just want to know how to be healthy.
Nobody wants to be unwell.
We want to be able to make our own choices based on clear and unbiased information.
Companies want to sell us what they produce, so they do what they can to convince us to change what we’re doing and come to their products.
It can get confusing. Some news article reports that some journal has published an article that some study says that what we’ve been eating for thousands of years is the reason for the health problems we’ve been experiencing for the last few generations. The study is paid for by the company selling the alternative to that food.
We try it. We feel worse. We try something else.
We’ve been tricked, again and again.
We’ve been told so many times that the thing we need to eat is the newest product, not the one our ancestors consumed for hundreds or thousands of generations.
- margarine instead of butter
- egg whites instead of whole eggs
- Canola instead of coconut oil
- sugar instead of fat
Wait a minute. Did anyone ever actually tell us we should be eating sugar?
Maybe not directly, but we started being told in the 1980s that we needed to avoid fat. And this meant we had to boost our sugar intake.
Why?
NPR’s Allison Aubrey laid out a brief history of how fat became a villain in Why We Got Fatter During The Fat-Free Food Boom. In short, a connection was made, with science as it had been discovered at the time, that saturated fats raised LDL cholesterol. “But there were a lot of complexities that scientists didn’t yet understand, and not a lot of data,” Aubrey qualifies.
This discovery led to fat being labelled as a cause of heart disease, and it was suggested by experts that fats be replaced with carbohydrates in our diets.
Fast forward several years of product development and marketing and we have a whole industry of low-fat food alternatives for those who wish follow decades old guidelines to lose weight by cutting fat.
The problem is that removal of fat from food makes it pretty unsavory. The fat is what makes food taste good, a lot of the time. How do we get food to taste good without fat? Add sugar. Lots of it.
A 2016 study, published in the journal Nutrition & Diabetes compared the sugar levels in several foods that are sold in standard and low or non-fat versions. Non-fat cottage cheese contained twice the amount of carbohydrates as regular cottage cheese, resulting from added sugar. Some salad dressings contained as much as ten times the carbs as their regular versions.
Sugar is more of a factor in weight gain than fat, it turns out, partially due to the effect of cortisol and other factors involved with how the body moves sugar around to keep it out of our blood when we overdo it on sweets.
In short, low-fat food contains more of what makes us gain weight than the regular versions of foods we may want to consume.
It may be a relief to know that you can follow your gut on this.
Even if margarine companies are telling us not to eat butter, we can eat butter. In fact, we should, according to Harvard Health.
The truth is, there never was any good evidence that using margarine instead of butter cut the chances of having a heart attack or developing heart disease. Making the switch was a well-intentioned guess, given that margarine had less saturated fat than butter, but it overlooked the dangers of trans fats.
Can you see how things start to get complicated when it comes to nutrition? Our body is a complex mechanism, and when we start zeroing in on singular factors, we risk offsetting the balance of our health. If saturated fat was ever even the scoundrel it was made out to be, it didn’t need to be replaced with manipulated fats that had dangerous effects we only later discovered.
When it comes to nutrition I like to take things as naturally as possible. This can even be applied to food products that aren’t natural. We can look to the ingredients. If I want to eat a muffin or a piece of cake, I’ll avoid the low-fat version. The other one will taste better and, while it’s not necessarily good for me to eat cake, at least I know I’m not compounding the issue by putting even more sugar in my body.
Do what our ancestors did.
We were attracted to fatty foods throughout our evolution because that’s the source of energy our bodies preferred.
That’s still the case.
The Atkins diet was a low carb, high fat and protein diet that acknowledged this. The problem it had was the complete elimination of carbs, which we do require some of. Ketogenic diets are similar. They promote the elimination of sugar, which means our bodies have less reason to move sugar into the cells, which means we don’t increase our adipose fat levels.
I’m not saying we should live on cake and doughnuts, but if we’re going to treat ourselves, or if we find ourselves at a party with cake being served, we should enjoy it and move on. We can make educated decisions that benefit our health and make things simpler.
Avoid the gimmicky versions of foods. Eat what tastes better. It usually does because it is better. Did anyone really prefer margarine to butter?
There is all kind of good news once we get the real story on nutrition. But we have to open to the possibility that it counters what we’ve been told on television all our lives.
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