Eating to keep off unwanted bodyfat is NOT a fad….

Welcome to our health & self help blog.

Focus on Your Health:

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.

We do posts on staying healthy; preventing disease; aging more slowly; weight loss; exercise; nutrition; & news in medicine.

Today's post: Thursday, 4-12-2007

Eating to keep off unwanted bodyfat is NOT a fad….

Yesterday, the Food & Wine section of our local newspaper ran a story by Janet Helm of the Chicago Tribune entitled: Urban Food Legends.

She gets most of her facts right; & the list she includes of popular diet books from 1864 to 2007 is very well done.

However, she also says, under How to Spot a Fad: “Avoid diet plans that require you to eliminate entire categories of food or rely on expensive supplements.”

To give her credit, some of the food categories eliminated by some diets are not that good for your health or doable; & she is absolutely correct so far in saying that taking supplements for fat loss as your main method is virtually always a waste of time & money.

(Many supplements do protect your health. But the few like green tea extract that help you lose fat only are about one percent effective. That may change one day. But don’t count on it.

And, since eating right & getting the right exercise every week DO help you avoid or lose unhealthy extra body fat & also have HUGE health benefits, adding supplements to lose fat is simply unnecessary. Further, the people who do try to rely on supplements only seem to STAY fat.)

However, most people in the United States & most food companies still seem to think that soft drinks & refined grains are normal, safe, & OK to drink & to eat.

Unfortunately, there is very convincing evidence that both regular & diet soft drinks actively make people fat. And this is particularly true when consumed several times every day by sedentary people over 30 years old.

So, guess what? If you don’t want to get fat or stay fat, it’s NOT a fad to eliminate them from what you eat & drink – or do so about 99.8 percent of the time.

That’s NOT a fad or a myth. It’s a FACT.

Whether sweetened by sugar -- or worse, by high fructose corn syrup – regular soft drinks add calories to your intake but do NOT make you less hungry.

Diet soft drinks are sweetened with compounds that many health writers believe are not entirely safe to consume.

And, surprisingly, the studies show they fatten just about as much as regular soft drinks when people drink them regularly.

It seems that when your body gets the taste of sugar but not the effects it manipulates your hunger hormone to make you hungrier & hungry for a real sugar fix. So even though the diet soft drink had no calories, you’re more likely to add a candy bar to it. And the amount of sugar you take in remains about what it would have been had you drunk a regular soft drink.

This, eliminating them from your diet for health & fat loss reasons, is also true of artificially hydrogenated oils.

Partially hydrogenated oils contain transfats (often also called trans fats). These directly trigger a large increase in the kind of LDL cholesterol that causes heart & vascular disease when eaten. They also help make you fat since they add calories & no nutritive value. And, they may help trigger type II diabetes. Thankfully, they are on the way to being totally outlawed.

Unfortunately, I read recently that fully hydrogenated oils are being substituted by some food companies to avoid the bans on transfats.

These are sometimes called interesterified fats or oils.

These apparently also trigger a large increase in the kind of LDL cholesterol that causes heart & vascular disease when eaten. But they are MUCH worse than partially hydrogenated oils since they also definitely trigger type II diabetes.

So, it’s NOT a “fad” to eliminate from what you eat any food that has partially hydrogenated or interesterified or fully hydrogenated oils. Eliminating these unnatural fats from your diet IS a prudent way to protect your health; lower your future medical bills; & to live longer.

And, eliminating them also will help you avoid or lose unhealthy extra body fat. Foods that contain them like crackers, cookies, pastries, pie crusts, cake, & ice cream tend to be foods with a lot of sugar and refined grains or both.

And, eating less of those at least 95 percent of the time is a proven way to avoid or lose unhealthy extra body fat.

Eliminating foods with refined grains definitely helps avoid or lose unhealthy extra body fat. They deliver very little nutrition &, worse, have no fiber. So, like sugar & regular soft drinks, they add to the calories you take in without making you less hungry.

And, their health track record is as bad. People who eat a lot of refined grains are not only fatter, they are more likely to get type II diabetes & heart & cardiovascular disease.

People who eat only whole grains tend to be in better health than people who eat refined grains; but unless they get huge amounts of exercise each day & do so every day, they tend to be fatter than is good for their health.

Eliminating whole grains AND refined grains IS getting to be more popular. This may prove to be a temporary thing which would make it a fad.

And, I’m the kind of person I dislike giving up things I’m not certain I have to, so I plan to continue to eat some whole grain foods a few times a week.

But many of the people who have given up all grains by eliminating whole grains AND refined grains have lost most of their extra bodyfat.

The explanation seems to be that humans evolved before they started eating grains. So we tend to digest & use them much less well than natural protein foods, vegetables, & fruits.

So, I do plan to cut my consumption of whole grains by 80 or 90 percent. And, if, when I do, my waist measurement goes down by several inches, I will definitely do a post on it.