Many have tried every single low-fat food and drink available to no avail. From planned meals to low-cal cocktails, nothing really worked, right? Well, you’ve been sold a bill of goods, about a billion dollars’ worth of foods that clearly don’t lead to healthy weight management, or a healthy heart for that matter. Diabetes, heart disease, and obesity continue to rise. What’s wrong with this picture?
To this day the American Heart Association, in good faith I’m sure, advocates avoiding butter, cream, eggs, and whole milk as the way to avoid heart attacks. Instead you’ve been told to eat and drink chicken without the skin, egg whites (but no yolks), margarine, skim milk, and low-fat salad dressings made with questionable vegetable oils. If you followed this advice you are probably the first to say “ugh” in addition to not losing any weight or, maybe, not avoiding a heart attack. Why is this?
We tend to believe advertising. What we need to know is this: our human bodies are made of protein. These proteins are composed of amino acids, of which several are considered “essential.” That means they must be consumed in the diet because they cannot be manufactured by our bodies. And our bodies don’t function well without these essential amino acids. Proteins are needed for all enzymatic processes that happen in daily life—like digestion, energy, and heart function! The following is a list of several amino acids that must come from foods and which foods they come from.
Histidine comes from dairy, eggs, meat, poultry; Isoleucine from the same sources as above; Leucine from dairy, meat, poultry, and wheat germ; Lysine from dairy, eggs, fish, meat, poultry; Methionine: dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds; Phenylalanine: dairy, eggs, meat, wheat germ; Threonine: beans, dairy, eggs, meat; Tryptophan: dairy, meat, nuts, poultry (especially turkey),; and finally, Valine from dairy, eggs, meat, poultry, and wheat germ. Well, you get the idea…
Vegetables and fruits are wonderful for providing vitamins and minerals but other sources of protein are important to keep us healthy.
But wait! Those amino acid, protein building blocks are the very foods you’ve been told for the last few decades to avoid! Meanwhile diabetes, heart disease, and obesity have continued to skyrocket. What’s going on here?
We’ve been advertised to near death. Sold a bill of goods. Crisco, fake eggs, margarine, and vegetable oils were ‘sold’ to us, via advertising, for heart health and weight loss. These things were touted as being better for you than real food!
Yet for thousands of years before advertising, humans have been consuming a traditional diet of dairy, eggs, meat, and poultry. And I mentioned wheat germ in my last column. These are the foods that bring us amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and the good fats. The foods that don’t make you fat (unless over-consumed) but have an important role in keeping you healthy with a managed weight.
If you still believe that fats raise your cholesterol, you’re partially right. Bad fats, and simple carbs, do raise blood sugar, cholesterol, and triglycerides in your blood. The “bad fats” are things like hydrogenated fats found in baked goods crackers and chips, any of the myriad of manipulated, colored, manufactured, and preservatized foodstuffs that advertisers push you to consider to be healthy food! But they’re not.
The good fats don’t make you fat or raise your cholesterol. Avocadoes, nuts oils, olive oil, sesame oil, and even butter, are not only real foods, they are foods, fats if you will, that are good for you! Most cholesterol is manufactured by your body and recycled. Surprised? That must mean that your body needs cholesterol. And that, in fact, is true. But why do we need cholesterol?
You have trillions of cells in your body and each and every cell has a membrane composed of lipids. Lipids are fats. Good fats keep those cell membranes fluid and “squishy” so they can move around your body and do their “chores.” The chores of a cell include taking in nutrients, building enzymes for metabolic processes, and releasing waste materials. If those cell membranes are composed of trans fats (from the above mentioned sources) the cells become stiff and unable to function properly, leading to illnesses and the inevitable endpoint.
The bottom line – get the trans fats out of your diet, put the good fats back in. Stop stressing about cholesterol, your body’s going to make it anyway and you need it for cellular health. Eat real food not fake food.
Don’t be cajoled or scared by advertising. Use your brain and think it through. Your brain by the way is composed of 40% fat so that should convince you of the need for good fats. But more on that another time.
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