Why we're fat

19/07/09 22:26 Filed in: Nutrition

Chronic disease is now affecting children.

More than 65 percent of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, which may increase the likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke, cancer, osteoarthritis, and fatty liver disease. Many other chronic diseases such as arthritis are worsened by obesity and/or diabetes.

Half of the health care cost in the United States for chronic disease relates to obesity.
This should be preventable, because obesity is preventable. It is just a matter of will power. Before anyone “flames” me, let me say that I do understand how difficult it is to lose weight – and it is far better not to put it on in the first place. But why are we where we are? Is it really our fault?

The low fat food myth

Just fifty years ago we used to use butter, and drink full-fat milk, and eat eggs, and occasionally have a pie and chips. But we rarely ate bags of crisps, or bottles of “pop” as snacks. And portion sizes were much smaller than they are now. And few people were overweight or obese.

Then the “experts” told us that eating fat was a really bad idea, and so we switched to margarine. And food technologists gave us partially hydrogenated vegetable fat – they knew, without knowing how*, that we could “sense” fat when we ate it, and that it gave a good “mouth feel” to foods, so people would eat more. And they put it in everything, or cooked everything in it.

And we became fat.

Who would have believed that the margarines and cooing oils were such a bad idea? They were sold to us as being healthy. Years later we discovered that they also had trans fats which turned out to be very unhealthy.

*Research suggests that the tongue has taste sensors dedicated to detecting fat, just as it does for salty, sour, bitter and sweet foods (and the dreaded umami taste).

But still we have the myth that margarine is healthy. New, non-hydrogenated margarine contains no trans fat, and it's softer because it is made with modified palm and palm kernel oil to make it spreadable. It has less total and saturated fat and fewer calories per gram than butter, and no cholesterol. The American Heart Association recommends the use of margarine as a substitute for butter.

But wait, butter contains a naturally-occurring trans fat, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which has some health benefits (such as in weight loss and osteoporosis prevention). But it is only found in full fat dairy products. It turns out that eating a smaller amount of butter (than margarine) would be the healthier alternative.

The “fat is bad” myth

Along with the myth that eating fat was bad for us, we stopped eating fatty fish, and nuts, and Avocados, and so on. But although these may be high in calories, the fat they contain is healthy. Eating appropriate small portions of these was actually a good idea, which has been rediscovered. As was the spoonful of cod liver oil that our grandmothers might have given us!

So while we might now consume vast quantities of low-fat dairy products, our bodies fail to get the fats they need, and we seek out other fatty foods. Like crisps (potato chips for our American readers). Years ago they came in small packs, but now we have “grab bags” and tubes with several hundred calories worth of crisps/chips that we can scoff down in just a few minutes.

There is a reason why “when you pop, you can’t stop”. That’s the sodium glutamate (MSG, and other newer “flavour enhancers such as 5'-ribonucleotides such as guanosine monophosphate “GMP” and inosine monophosphate “IMP” that greatly enhance its perceived intensity) that have been added. Their sole purpose is to trick the brain into thinking that those crisps/chips or the tube of chips you just couldn’t stop eating, was actually a protein-based food. Truly – so your digestive system gears up for protein, when there isn’t any. And you eat 400 kcal of basically fat.

We have a Japanese company to “thank” for bringing us MSG, but many firms now hide similar material under the misnomer “natural flavoring”, and sadly our food regulators let them get away with this deception. They (the regulators) must shoulder a large part of the blame for the levels of obesity in the population, and the health-care costs that will follow.

The agri-food business also brought us high fructose corn syrup as a cheaper alternative to sugar (same calories, but worse effect on obesity). Again the regulators allow firms to mislabel products such as drinks as containing “sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup” – when they never use sugar. Why? So the consumer is not able to make a choice, even if they do know that HFCS is less healthy than sugar?

What about diet drinks? People who drink “diet” sodas still put on weight. Why? Because we can taste “sweetness” and the pancreas puts out insulin in response in anticipation of the sugar load in the food. But if there is no sugar, we get “hypo” (hypoglycaemic) leading to irritability – and we seek out some other source of energy, usually a high calorie snack.

This time we have an American company to thank for bringing us aspartame. And the regulators for allowing this toxin to be used as a food and drink additive. It is simply better to wean ourselves off “sweetness” and although it takes a couple of weeks, it is well worth the effort. Just drink water.

Why do we like fat?

The sense of taste informs us about the quality of food that we eat. Despite the fact that fat is tasteless, it stimulates a sensor on the tongue and signals are transmitted to the brain. So it seems we’re wired up to sense fat – which means that we must need to know when we’ve eaten it.

Perhaps it will be no surprise that obese subjects prefer lipid (fat) more when compared to lean subjects, suggesting that inappropriate fat perception might influence obesity risk by impacting on the food choices and eating behaviour. An alteration in their tongue’s fat perception may be linked to this preference. In experimental mice, when a specific gene was turned off, the mice stopped craving fat and their gastrointestinal systems ceased preparing for its arrival.

The French researchers and commentary said that the existence of a built-in 'fat sensor' might prove a boon if researchers could figure out a way of turning it off to make fatty foods less tempting. How about just turning it on with the right foods? Like the French themselves do, with “proper” food and cheese afterwards instead of a sweet desert? When most of us have cheese and biscuits, we seem to have more biscuits than cheese – the French simply have a tiny bit of bread with their cheese. A much more healthy idea.

We adjusted to the gradual increase in the amount of salt that bakers added to bread (and other foods) – so we find that lower salt bread tastes “odd”. But we can also adjust down again to lower levels of salt. The same is true with sugar and fat.

If we are going to eat fat, because we do need it, at least let’s make it something that is useful for our bodies – not tanker loads of vegetable oil. The major changes in the essential fatty acid composition of our Western food supply, including a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, may be reflected in increased risk of cancer, heart attacks, obesity, osteoporosis, inflammatory disease, personality disorders, and “suboptimal social cohesion”. Anyone for cod liver oil? Or a Mediterranean diet?

Just don’t eat it

For an average male, 30 minutes of walking burns about 135 kcal. That’s not much if you are trying to lose weight since you need a 3500 calorie deficit to lose 1 lb. (2.2.kg). Running at 5 mph for 30 minutes burns only about 280 calories. The amount and type of food you eat is extremely important when it comes to losing weight and getting healthy. If you don’t eat it, you don’t have to lose it!

The science stuff “it’s not the fat, it’s the type of fat”.

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Why we're fat

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