Day 10: nasty fats can make you sick

Day: 10 of 42
Starting weight: 78.4kg Last recorded weight: 76kg
How I'm feeling today: feeling pretty low, but can notice a reduction of the fat around my ribcage, which is exciting. Does changing your diet like this affect your mood?

A few years ago my friend Alison Jones told me about a book she'd read about saturated fats and how not only are they not so bad after all, they are in fact good for you. She switched to cooking with ghee back then and hasn't looked back.

We were discussing my favourite nutrition book The Powerhouse Diet, in which Leslie Kenton outlines the rather disturbing effects of trans fats (hydrogenated fats) on your body.

Trans Fats

Some Trans fats occur naturally but the majority are vegetable oils that are extracted from the original source using heat (and often filtered through solvents to get rid of their rancid smell). They cannot be absorbed by the body, and clog up the fat receptors, so that good fats are unable to be absorbed. Additionally they raise levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol in your body, while simultaneously lowering levels of "good" HDL cholesterol.

"Experts in fat metabolism now blame our ever-increasing consumption of trans fatty acids and our ever decreasing consumption of essential fatty acids in no small part for premature aging and the growth of degenerative diseases including heart-attacks and cancer." - Leslie Kenton

Many items such as margarines, packaged biscuits and puddings contain these fats, as they take a long time to degrade on the shelf. Keep an eye out for the word "hydrogenated" on ingredients lists and avoid it like the plague that it is.

The Good Oils

I've been avoiding trans fats for some time and using Olive oil for lower temperature cooking, and Rice Bran oil for high temperatures. However there is another factor to consider with vegetable oils, which I've only just discovered, and that is the difference between cold pressed and refined oils.

A cold pressed, or "virgin" oil has been physically pressed, and contains all the great nutrients we have been told to consume. However refined oil has been through chemical and physical processing and contains compounds that can be harmful to your body. So if you are choosing and olive oil, choose virgin for cooking and extra virgin (preferably locally grown) for eating straight out of the bottle.
Better still is uncooked oil, so good practice is to finish your dish with a drizzle of extra virgin just before serving for maximum health benefits.

After reading various articles about Canola oil, I have decided to stop using it too. While it's promoted as being beneficial to your health, when you look into to it you'll find that the fatty acids it contains naturally are not good for you, and it's only through genetic modification that Canola oil marketers have been able to claim its new "healthy" status. The Eades (Lose Your Middle-Aged Middle) recommend avoiding it because it contains "anti-nutrients", and this article gives a fairly good background to why you should avoid it.

Fatty Liver Disease and Vegetable Oils

The Eades claim, in contrast to conventional medical advice, that rather than saturated fat being the cause of fat around the middle and heart disease, all evidence points away from this and instead to omega-6 fats and sugar.

They describe a study in which animals were given alcohol to cause fatty liver syndrome. What they discovered is that saturated fat can actually reduce accumulated liver fat, even when the alcohol intake is sustained. Whereas vegetable oils, high in omega-6 fatty acids (which are inflammatory), caused a rapid buildup of fat in the liver. Although a small amount of omega-6 is good for us, the amount we currently ingest is not. History shows that they ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 we used to eat was something like 1:2 Americans currently consume a ratio of approximately 20:1.

Oils high in omega-6 are corn, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, and soy.

The Eades conclusion is the reason so many people in Western societies are obese nowadays is because we have switched to a diet high in vegetable fats containing omega-6, which cause fatty liver syndrome.

Therefore their diet includes butter, cream, the skin on chicken and the fat on meat. They specifically recommend marbled meat, such as scotch fillet, as the marbled fat is "primarily oleic acid - the same fatty acid that is prevalent in olive oil and gives it its purported health virtues".

While writing this post I discovered that Lesley Kenton has done a book on low carb eating, that specifically discussed the dreaded Syndrome X, called The X Factor Diet. Here's a handy link to a review of this book compared to a similar one by Sandra Cobot. I remember in The Powerhouse Diet, Kenton gives a nod to Aitkins as being half there with his theories but not keeping up with more contemporary research, and this review points out that neither Cobot or Kenton recommend the quantities of fat that Aitkins did.

Today's Food: Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps

Tonight's dinner was delicious. (Though it would have been good if the book's authors had made a note that it required marination on the menu list.)