Randomly, I saw mention of this book, "
Fat Fallacy" on a message board, and immediately ordered it in Amazon. The premise is that Americans eat a low-fat diet and manage to be the fattest people in the world, while the french eat rich indulgent foods and maintain their slender frames and this book will tell us what the secret is.
Even though I strongly recommend reading this book, I'm going to tell you the secret anyway (I don't think you'll be surprised): The eat real food, we eat chemicals disguised as food that manage to ruin our nervous system, give us heart disease and cancer, and make us... fat.
It seems as though nutrition scientists are looking for he one element that can cure us from fatness. They notice that people who eat vegetables have lower chances for cardio-vascular disease. The scientists realize the veggies draw their super power from beta-carotene. So they find a way to extract the beta-carotene, but it in pill form (with other synthetic properties), and viola! We can get the effects of eating vegetables without having the suffer through all those greens.
Now, here's where it get's tricky. Of course scientific tests can show a plethora of results, but in people who took beta-carotene vs. the placebo there was not a significant difference in people who got heart disease.
So once the book teaches you to look at nutrition data in our country with a skeptical eye, you start to think about all the fad diets. Remember when butter was bad for you? Aren't carbs the devil? We were supposed to avoid nuts and oils, and now we're told we should be consuming at least two teaspoons of oil a day. Now we're knee deep in good fats vs. bad fats. The funny thing is natural fats aren't bad for us, it's the fats created by to help extend the shelf life.
What I took away from the book was that our body was created to process a certain amount of fat. By eating a fat free diet, our body goes into fat starvation mode, so it holds onto what fat you already have. It requires so many chemicals to remove the natural fats from wonderful food like cheese. And artificial sweetners that have terrible chemical reactions when they enter our bodies, or can be linked to cancer, heart-disease, and diabetes. We should be avoiding aspartame, dyes, high-fructose corn syrup, olestra... I'll get to that in a different post.
It has a little bit of a diet to follow; more like guidelines. But overall it initiates a first step in establishing a better relationship with our food.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: If it's not food don't eat it.
