I was talking to a group in the health industry this week and we discussed ‘low fat’ and ‘sugary’ foods and I wasn’t surprised to hear some of the responses.
Many people think that eating fat is what makes you fat, and that’s great for a company selling low fat products. The people employed to sell all this low fat food must be worth the millions of dollars they make each year.
I saw a processed cheesecake box with ‘low fat’ written in big letters and pictures of strawberries on it like that made it a great healthy food. What the!
Don’t swallow the advertising, or the food.
Here are some things that didn’t make the ads. When you eat, the food is digested into tiny bits and gets into the bloodstream. The hormone Insulin is responsible for storing away all this food and getting it out of the blood and into your cells. Yes including your fat cells!
While Insulin is getting that food out of your blood, it shuts down the systems in your body that use fat for energy until it gets rid of all this energy already in the blood. The more Insulin released the more storage into your cells is happening.
The more often your Insulin spikes up and down the more likely you are to suffer a host of medical issues from diabetes type 2 to cardiovascular disease and obesity; do some research on ‘metabolic syndrome’ too.
Guess what food triggers the highest Insulin release? Simple sugars.
Guess what type of food doesn’t trigger this Insulin jump? Fats.
So you could eat fat and your body stay in a fat burning mode. Eat a heap of junky, sugary food and you turn into a fat storing machine.
And yes, sugars can easily get stored as fat. Sugar has also been shown to lower the effectiveness of your immune system for hours and many other unhealthy effects.
So don’t be scared of good fats like your meats, nuts and oils or a ripe avocado; they have lots of benefits.
Eat the good natural stuff, feel the difference and have a good weekend.
