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Are you still caught up in the low-fat mantra of the past couple decades? Do you think you have to cut back on the amount of fat you eat if you are trying to lose weight? These ideas are still so prevalent in our media and in the low-fat products you see everywhere, in the grocery stores and in restaurants, that it’s no wonder you may still believe this. In fact, even many doctors still believe this.
However, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control , in 1999-2000, an estimated 64% of adults in the United States were either obese or overweight. That is almost 2/3 of the adult population! 1/3 of our children are now overweight as well, and these figures are increasing.
In the past 30 years, the number of overweight children has doubled. In just the past decade, the number of obese people in the U.S. has gone up 2½ times. Fifty years ago, only a small percentage of the population had problems with their weight. Now it’s an epidemic! All this has happened while we cut back from 40% to around 32% fat as a percentage of our diet.
Low-fat diets not only don’t work, but they are not healthy, not natural, and they tend to promote weight gain! Research confirms this statement. The famous Framingham Study that started in 1948 is still going on, and it shows that the more saturated fat, the more calories, and the more cholesterol a person ate, the lower their serum cholesterol! The results also show that the more fat they ate, the less they weighed! We are eating less fat as a nation, but are gaining weight. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that since fat gives foods much of their flavor, when manufacturers cut out the fat, they add sugar, MSG and other chemicals to the food to enhance the taste. These can all have adverse effects on both our weight and our health.
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