This part, in my experience as someone who is muscular w/ a low body fat percentage, is not necessary. I actually find it easiest to get very, very lean (< 7-8%) by adding more fat to my diet, along with fiber-rich foods like green vegetables.
I am American too and otherwise totally concur with what you've written. It's shocking how badly Americans eat, and how distant their diet is from what I consider the basic staple foods that humans should be eating. My dietary suggestion to anyone looking to lose weight would be to cook large batches of high-fiber vegetables and eat those before each meal. The combination of fat and fiber is key to feeling completely 'full' and satiated while maintaining a moderate level of caloric intake. Beyond that, eating a wide variety of foods and eliminating sweet drinks / packaged food gets you 90% of the way to a healthy diet.
I joke, but i do agree with what you have said.
Sugars / refined starches seem to be the nutrition villains, not natural, saturated fats. (But who knows! The recommendations change almost daily, it seems.)
"The Story of Fat: Why we were Wrong about Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S6-v37nOtY
Anecdotally I too am moving towards LCHF/Keto and so far my health has improved drastically from primarily focusing on adding fats back in after years of carefully measured low-fat low-calorie diets did nothing for me.
When you go off keto you cannot maintain the high saturated fat intake without measurable negative impacts.
I'm making a documentary about all of this stuff mentioned in the comments. Would like feedback:
or google "food lies film"
There are significant differences in the way bodies metabolize the different saturated fatty acids. Sometimes the metabolic pathways compete with one another, so ratios can matter as much as raw quantity.
If you just go by total saturated fat content, without looking at the specific chemical components, you can't tell the difference between coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and palm oil.
While anything you eat has the potential to be terrible for you at a certain level of consumption, a certain level of specificity is called for. Someone who has chosen coconut oil as their staple fat has made a conscious effort to eat more lauric acid and less palmitic acid or stearic acid. If it was just a matter of saturated fat versus unsaturated fat, and they wanted to eat more saturated, they could have chosen the much cheaper palm oil or pork lard.
Even if the person chooses to eat minimal saturated fat, there are still great differences in the available dietary fats. Is it rich or poor in omega-3 and omega-6? Have any double bonds flipped from cis-bonds to trans-bonds? Are the fatty acids free or still attached to a glycerol? Does the eater have any genetic conditions that make a particular metabolic pathway slower, limited by the presence of some other nutrient, or absent entirely?
In general, we still don't know a lot about the specifics of fat metabolism. As long as there is an excess of carbohydrate in the body, lipids are generally used as building blocks of the body--like amino acids from protein--rather than for energy. They come in many shapes and sizes, like LEGO blocks, except unlike those hard plastic blocks and bits, the body can cut and bend and reshape its lipids within certain metabolic constraints.
If any particular building block is in excess, the body usually just makes more of whatever the default structure is for that piece. Too much stearic acid might get hooked together with a glycerol and dumped into the oil drop in a white adipose cell. Too much palmitic acid might get rolled into LDL cholesterol. Too much lauric acid could get put into HDL cholesterol. We don't really know for sure what the body does when the ratios are off, or what the perfect balance of ratios is.
It has gained much wider adoption recently of you include things like Atkins, but true keto is still very much more often used by a very self selected group of fitness people and a limited time (although I could be wrong and don't know of any good serveys).
However keto is not a long term diet and I don't know if long term effects have rally been studied much. I know more people that do keto cycling than sustained keto anymore.
google "food lies film"
https://examine.com/nutrition/is-saturated-fat-bad-for-me/
You can even find people who are into various forms "traditional foods" (not diet trends like paleo...though maybe that too?) go further than more cautious articles like this in affirming -benefits- of saturated fat. Catherine Shanahan for example argues in Deep Nutrition that saturated fat can be good.
Regardless, choosing to cook with coconut oil instead of olive or avocado oil clearly falls under that.
I have friends that now cook with coconut oil as one of their main oils replacing poly unsaturated oils. I think it is going to be like soy and in 20 years the nutrition community is going to do yet another 180 on it.
Put simply, it is now thought that cholesterol is a plaster over the arterial inflammation caused by sugars. It is a symptom, not a cause of plaques.
Has it really?
I see a lot of new contradictory results, but I am not aware that the medical consensus has changed (yet). I have seen articles blame fat as the, blame carbs as the bad guy and even some blaming protein. Refined sugar does seem to be particularly bad, but I have yet to see anything conclusive about carbohydrates as a food group (I searched pubmed a few months back).
Personally I am more confused than ever.
Actual studies linked within.
These findings provide evidence that consuming PUFA in place of SFA reduces CHD events in RCTs.
i.e. replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease, which was my original claim.
From your article:
Saturated fats do increase cholesterol levels relative to polyunsaturated fats.
You need some fat in your diet, but the overwhelming evidence is that you're better off getting it from unsaturated (plant-based) sources.
""" Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid. """
Going 20 mph is slower than going 30 mph but it is not going in reverse.
https://thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/the-b...
For example: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-do-we-know-that-cholest...
People want to hear they can eat all the eggs and butter and bacon they want but it’s just not true.
It is very easy to increase fat intake. I get it mostly from olive oil and peanut butter. A serving of each is 14g.
That's true, but that's also unfortunately a very ignorant attitude given that half of Europeans are overweight and an increasing percentage is obese. The common perception that obesity rates in America are some bizarre cultural oddity does not help people learn from them and avoid it recurring in other countries. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
I don't think our preprocessed foods use as much sugar as yours (do we even have corn syrup ?). But we sure have some [edit : preprocessed foods], although they are probably not as bad as american's because of stricter regulation (bless the EU).
But government now decided to update it, and get rid of all the "economic" influence, which was steered towards grain, meat and dairy industry, and only base it on what is healthy.
To make their statement clear, they literally turned the food pyramid upside down.
See https://www.gezondleven.be/themas/voeding/voedingsdriehoek. Nevermind all the Flemish, just scroll to the picture.
About fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S6-v37nOtY About salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ygExIZm7Wo
Look at the images in the article. Notice the huge "unrefined carbs" part, and the tiny little "free sugars" part?
This is the bread the authors envisioned you to eat: https://www.baeckerei-guenther.de/cms/upload/sortiment/brot/...
That's why the cheeseburger is a perfectly balanced food pyramid meal. You have protein from beef, dairy from cheeze product TM(contains no actual cheese), grain from the bun, AND your fruit and vegetables from the ketchup.
~ Dave Thomas (Founder of WENDY's, and fitness enthusiast)
These rates are much better than the US, but it seems like Europe hasn’t yet figured out the whole healthy diet issue.
It also applies less as you pass 2 standard deviations of average height.
So, if you are 6'1 and have bulky shoulders and no belly, your bmi should actually be on the high side. Warning signs are when you see ribs or when you can pinch belly fat.
Also fat doesn't make you fat. A lot of people actually rapidly lose weight on a ketogenic diet with approx 70% of their food being healthy fats.
The Story of Fat: Why we were Wrong about Health https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S6-v37nOtY
I love that channel. Entertaining, informative, and succinct. I've learned a lot from it.
If media literacy and home economics were part of the core curriculum, we'd easily see a decline in health-related issues from fast-food consumption and poor grocery shopping habits. Until, of course, Yum! Brands finds a way to partner with the schools and modifies the curriculum.
I personally had 9 weeks of combined sewing and cooking, that really taught me nothing. (My sister got a lowered grade for not following the recipe exactly). I was lucky - I had already been cooking for a few years by then because I liked it. Had that been my only introduction to cooking, though, I'd not be very functional as a new adult.
My "financial" education happened in 8th grade - age 13, when you can't rent an apartment until 18 most times. This consisted of a car salesman teaching us about loans and interest and tax forms... giving us extra credit if our parents looked at a car. Even more credit if they bought one.
That said, most high schools have some sort of child development classes as an optional class. If you are interested in stem classes or otherwise on a college-bound path, you might not be offered such classes or be able to fit them into your class schedule. High school cooking, if even offered, generally focused on job placement where I lived.
The part about putting the fork on the left and the knife (blade facing the plate) and spoon on the right was useless filler. When they added in salad forks and dessert spoons, I really had to wonder how many rich people just got tired of screaming at their servants for putting the soup spoon where the dinner spoon should go. A practical class would have graded us on our use of chopsticks, instead of the correct placement of the asparagus-tickler for a 15-course banquet.
They never taught us about peanut-butter burritos that require no cooking, water, or refrigeration--great for when you have no utilities turned on. They never mentioned the magical amino-acid balance of beans-rice-corn or ordinary potato, for when you can't afford actual meat. They certainly didn't say anything about the locked trash containers behind the grocery store or haggling over the coupon policy. They didn't go into any detail about how the remains of one meal can be used to stretch the next. That would have been useful stuff to learn for the bottom economic quintile we were to be dumped into after high-school graduation.
My own kids don't even have it as an elective. Future food comes from a box or a vending machine. I suspect that the last master chefs will be programming DLC modules for all the auto-cook robots.
you can eat "as much as you want" as long as you are cutting carbs is because your body is in burn mode because it's deprived of energy. It's bad for you in the long term. Why anyone think they can eat as many handfuls of cheddar cheese as the want and have no consequences is deceived.
Source for this? In my opinion this is outdated thinking and new studies have shown the opposite.
Further the tendency is to eat one far more potatoes than fruit. Also a banana has a GI of 52, vs 85 for a baked potato vs pure Glucose 100( http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/glycemic-index) other sites have different numbers but always place a potato significantly higher.
I have seen one study that concluded that boiled white potato was the most filling of all the foods tested. I don't recall whether bananas were included.
Equal-calorie portions of specific foods were given to volunteers, who were then allowed to consume until sated from a buffet. Those who ate boiled whole potato first ate fewer calories from the buffet than any other "appetizer". Noteworthy was the fact that french fries and baked potato--made from the same stuff--scored abysmally by this measure, almost the worst of all foods.
Boiling, chilling, and reheating your potato to plate temperate may even enhance this effect through the process of starch retrogradation.
Bananas are typically eaten uncooked. Potatoes are barely ever eaten raw. And it would also appear that the method of preparation has an effect.
It would certainly be possible to test the experiment result at home with a food diary, to see if adding one food in particular to your diet causes you to eat more or less in total than is usual for you.
they may be similar physically, but they are not similar culturally.
Very often, you eat one banana in the morning. However, you can easily eat 3 potatoes in the morning, 1 during lunch and 5 for diner.
That's why you need to cut back on potatoes but can still eat that one banana.
Edit: Why the downvotes? This is one the main reason a nutritionist will tell you to cut potatoes from your diet. It's not a question of quality but of quantity. A single banana is easy to portion but baked, boiled, mashed and/or fried potatoes are harder. Restaurants will serve them in huge quantities and people have problems portioning them so it's easier to say "cut them out".
That aside, a large part of it seems to be culture. If you're living in a university-owned dorm, it is often mandatory to buy a card which provides dinner (usually at a ridiculous price). When you don't cook, you are less involved with the ingredients of your dinner, and more inclined to just 'take what tastes good'.
People criticize the US without problem all the time on HN; if you have been banned, it wasn't because you were criticizing the US (you may have been critical of the US in the comment that provoked the ban, but that wasn't the feature of the comment that provoked it.)
Is this a problem on HN? I haven't noticed it. You must have said something really atrocious. And the comment above you make reference to, though a bit tactless, is OK in my opinion.
> You must have said something really atrocious.
No, I just stated facts (the US performing poorly on various measures).
> Is this a problem on HN? I haven't noticed it.
I didn't either. I'm not sure if it's a problem, maybe I just had bad luck. It might also have to do with how banning works: You can see your posts, but others can. So banned folks might not realize that they are banned.
> And the comment above you make reference to, though a bit tactless, is OK in my opinion.
In my opinion too. And, as I said, my remarks were similar (I think even less tactless, as I was just stating facts).
Everything that is flour based is refined, lacks fiber etc so I get the pasta and bread exclusion, but the potatoes one makes no sense imo.
Overall in this thread, once again americans discover that they eat shit and simply cooking meals yourself from scratch (with limited fat of course) with no treats between meals makes you lose weight. For Europeans, the whole USA deal with food is really laughable. An american friend (largely overweight of course) was taking a starbucks with cream extrasugar and what not everyday. He was astonished when we said that it was really high on calories (and has stopped since). What is wrong that most americans (even educated ones) seem to have no idea of what an healthy diet is ?