Diet | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

But isn’t saturated fat dangerous?

It’s understandable you might think dietary cholesterol is bad for you, or that eating too much saturated fat will increase your risk of heart disease or early death.

After all, for about five decades that’s what we’ve been told by governmental bodies and nutritional panels.

So when I suggest that one of the most important keys to a healthy diet, #BodyBabyStep Two, is “Seek Satiety in Filling Fats,” it’s understandable that you might have misgivings.

If eggs, fatty cuts of red meat and the like are filled with “artery-clogging saturated fats,” we should avoid them, right?

That sounds plausible, but the scientific evidence doesn’t support it, as my Health Sherpas would testify.

In this excellent video (embedded below) from the 2015 Low Carb Down Under conference, Professor Jeff Volek of The Ohio State University reviews what the peer-reviewed studies of low-fat vs. low-carb diets have suggested.

I have cued it to begin as he starts discussion of dietary saturated fat and the ketogenic diet, and would encourage you to watch it when you have time. For a quick summary, scroll down below the video player.

Professor Volek’s key points:

Dietary intake of saturated fat was not associated with heart attacks, stroke or death from cardiac causes, based on three pooled results of 60 cohort studies involving nearly a million total participants (see slide below).

Increased saturated fat in the bloodstream and stored in body tissues is associated with heart disease.
The Key: Those stored and circulating saturated fats do not come from the saturated fats you eat, but rather from the way your body processes excess carbohydrates, turning them into fat in your liver.
Eating more saturated fat as part of a ketogenic diet actually reduces saturated fat levels in your bloodstream.

Your body metabolizes the saturated fat you eat much differently in the presence of carbohydrates and insulin. With high carbs and saturated fat, you’re more likely to store the saturated fats in unhealthy forms.

There’s lots more detail in the video, and I’d encourage you to check it out in its entirety.

Feel free also to look up the scientific papers he cited, to check his work. I searched for the first one and found the PDF, which you can download if you’d like. Here’s the money quote as I see it:

There is probably no direct relation between total fat intake and risk of CHD. The strongest evidence in support of this judgement comes from the Women’s Health Initiative that showed that CHD risk was not reduced after 8 years of a low-fat diet. The observational evidence, summarised in the meta-analysis, showed no association between total fat intake and CHD risk, although there was heterogeneity between the study results.

Dietary studies are difficult with free-living subjects; you can’t know for sure that people were fulfilling the requirements of their “arm” of the study. Others rely on surveys asking people to estimate what they had eaten over the course of some period. Memories are faulty, and sometimes subjects understate their participation in what might be considered “unhealthy” choices.

The main point is that those who have been telling us saturated fat is dangerous do not have strong evidence to support that claim.

Still, their perspective has governed nutrition policy and what is offered in school lunches, hospital cafeterias and throughout the food ecosystem.

With prevalence of obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome tripling in the last few decades, we’ve clearly been going in the wrong direction .

As far as I’m concerned, the low-fat proponents do not have the evidence on their side, and as you explore for yourself I think you’ll agree.

That, along with the better results I’m seeing personally not only in weight loss and improved vitality but also lowered blood pressure and triglycerides and increased HDL (the “good” cholesterol), makes me confident low-carb is most effective for most people.

At least for the two-thirds of Americans who are currently overweight or obese.

We have to do something different, right?

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Seek Satiety in Filling Fats

Stopping Sugar and Cutting Carbs are important ingredients in the #BodyBabySteps, but the “meat” of the plan — literally and figuratively — is to Seek Satiety.

You will likely need cut back significantly on your carbohydrates, but that’s a negative focus. A positive focus is more helpful, emphasizing what you do eat instead of what you don’t.

My first meal of the day is typically four eggs, meat, cream cheese and guacamole. I’m usually not hungry for the rest of the day.

The key is to start with satiety as your goal, and to seek it in meats, full-fat dairy, cheese, eggs and other substantial foods.

Build your meals around these main courses. They’re your anchors. Don’t load up on carbohydrates first, and then top off with your filling foods. Start with rich, satisfying foods with a good amount of fat.

Eat at a leisurely pace, and stop when you’re full.

Fats are your friends, as long as they’re coming from natural, healthy sources like beef, fish, poultry, pork, nuts, olive oil and avocados. That’s not an exclusive list, but what you’ll notice about all of these is they are basic, whole foods.

They’re not highly processed.

What fats aren’t healthy? The so-called “vegetable” oils – corn, canola, soybean, safflower, sunflower. These are extracted from seeds under immense pressure and with the aid of industrial solvents. In their natural states no one would think of these seeds as “oily.” And instead of the healthy Omega-3 fatty acids, they are predominantly the less stable Omega-6s.

Dr. Ken Berry is one of my Health Sherpas, and one thing I appreciate about him is his down-to-earth, no-nonsense communication style, with short videos that get to the point.

He’s a great resource because as a physician, rigorously following the “eat less, move more” dogma he was prescribing to his patients, he found himself at about 300 pounds.

He suspected that if he was following the dietary guidelines and had become obese, that’s probably what was happening with his patients, too.

Here he discusses common misconceptions even physicians have about fats:

For related discussion, see also Dr. Berry’s video about “The Proper Human Diet.”

If you think your friends might find this post helpful, I hope you’ll share by email or on your social networks using the buttons below.

To get these updates on a regular basis you can subscribe by email, or follow me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, where I’ll also be posting links.

Check out My Health Journey and my #BodyBabySteps.

Juice is the Worst!

While much of what the U.S. government has done relating to food and nutrition has been counterproductive at best (such as the food guide pyramid), its incorporation of ingredient and macronutrient information in food labels is mostly helpful when read with discernment.

One thing you’ll find is that sugar is everywhere.

When you read a food label, if you see SUGAR, BROWN SUGAR, HONEY, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, SUCROSE, DEXTROSE, LACTOSE or any other -OSE – especially among the first few ingredients – stay away!

Juice is a special case, though. When you review an ingredient label for 100% fruit juice, you might see lists like:

INGREDIENTS: FILTERED WATER, ORGANIC APPLE JUICE CONCENTRATE, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C)
INGREDIENTS: Grapefruit Juice (water, grapefruit juice concentrate)

What could be wrong with those? They’re “all natural” or maybe even “ORGANIC”!

It doesn’t even list sugar as an ingredient.

Well, let’s do a comparison.

Few would consider Coca-Cola (or any other sugar-sweetened carbonated beverage, for that matter) a healthy drink. (I’m not picking on Coke, here; it’s actually the soda, or “pop” depending on your region, that I have most enjoyed over the years.)

Look at its Nutrition Facts label, you’ll see plenty of warning signs:

Obviously with High Fructose Corn Syrup behind only water among its ingredients, you’ll expect this to be high in sugar. And sure enough, each 12-ounce can has 39g of Total Sugars (all of them Added Sugars.)

That’s bad, right?

Well, let’s compare with several 100% fruit juices:

Orange, Grapefruit, Apple and Grape juice nutrition labels.

Each these lists “0g Added Sugars” as if that’s something of which the bottlers should be proud. I realize that’s an item the government requires them to note, but it detracts from the real news, which is that for an 8-ounce serving, total sugars for these juices are:

Grapefruit – 17g
Orange – 23g
Apple – 28g
Grape – 36 g

When adjusted to the same serving size as a can of Coke (and rounding down to be generous), those range from 26g to 54g for 12 ounces.

Apple juice and grape juice actually have more sugar per ounce than Coke!

Here’s my confession: in the last half of the 1990s, I would regularly stop at the convenience story on my morning commute and buy a quart of orange juice to drink on the way to work!

I actually thought that was a healthy choice! I mean, it had Vitamin C, right?

Based on the figures above, I was getting 92g of sugar before 8 a.m. almost every workday. And that was after I had eaten a bowl of cereal that typically included 16g of sugars and 41g of total carbohydrates.

I might as well have had a 48-ounce Coke for breakfast!

Fruit in reasonable quantities is good because it carries fiber with it, which fills you up and also slows the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream.

But my Nordic ancestors didn’t have fresh fruit year-round, and yet somehow here I am today. Fruit is less necessary than you may think.

So as you’re taking #BodyBabyStep One, quitting fruit juice (and all other sugar-sweetened beverages) is essential.

Don’t do as I did; do as I do now.

I drink coffee black, or with fat-based additives that don’t cause blood sugar spikes and also slow release of caffeine.

Best. Yogurt. Ever.

As I mentioned in my last post, Dr. William Davis has recommended a particular strain of bacteria, Lactobacillis reuteri, as having many health benefits.

He discussed those benefits in the video I embedded in that post, and now as promised here’s a video I produced that demonstrates how to make it.

Dr. Davis suggests you can make the yogurt by putting the liquid in a pan in the oven. He says you can just turn the oven up to 350ºF for 90 seconds, and then shut it off, repeating the cycle every few hours to keep the temperature between 100-110ºF.

In my experience that’s way too much work, and is susceptible to failure. If you forget to turn off the oven, you kill the bacteria. If you fail to turn on the oven at least once in the middle of the night, the whole mix can sour. I had a couple of flops in my first five batches using that method.

That’s why I decided to get a yogurt maker, which keeps the mix at a constant temperature with no need to pay attention to it. Since then I would guess I have made 50 batches or more, and haven’t had a single failure.

After getting the BioGaia tablets, which contain the bacteria, and inulin powder as a source of prebiotic fiber on which they feed, all you need is the liquid that will be turned into yogurt.

Dr. Davis says he uses half-and-half as his base, and also has made yogurt from almond milk or coconut milk. If you use almond milk, he says you need to add some sugar to your mix, in addition to the inulin.

Whole milk is another option, but my choice is a mix of half-and-half with heavy whipping cream, as you’ll see in the video. This is definitely not low-fat yogurt.

I have gotten great results by keeping the mix at 104ºF for 36 20 hours, and by putting some water in the yogurt maker it keeps the temperature more even throughout the jars. After they’re done, I put them in the refrigerator.

As you can see, this is the thickest yogurt you’re likely to find. It stands up straight.

When it’s time to eat, I take one of the jars from the refrigerator and spread it out in a dish, adding three more teaspoons of the inulin both to sweeten the yogurt and to provide some prebiotic fiber to feed the bacteria in my GI tract.

I think it tastes great plain, but I typically also top it with some fresh raspberries or blackberries.

This is a delicious dessert, and I think the benefits Dr. Davis cites seem to hold true for me. He says it has a powerful appetite-suppressant effect, and while I think my low-carb diet has helped me not experience cravings during my typical 18-hour fasting window, the yogurt could definitely be a contributing factor.

Dr. Davis also touts the skin-thickening and collagen-increasing properties of L. reuteri and this yogurt, which supposedly results in a more youthful appearance and faster wound healing. I found a picture that isn’t necessarily definitive in this regard, but it might give a clue.

The picture on the left is from January 2019, when I was just starting to make and eat the yogurt. I tried to duplicate the angle in the one on the right this evening, 16 months later. The horizontal forehead creases seem less pronounced to me, but you be the judge:

I think the oxytocin-enhancement benefits are real too, as I’ve been able to put on muscle mass through weightlifting.

Since I find it so delicious, and because research suggests benefits that my own experience tends to support, I plan to keep making this for Lisa and me for the long term.

If you try it, I’d love to hear about your experience.

See the whole series about my health journey. Follow along on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Postscript: I had originally kept the mix at 104 degrees F for 36 hours, but I had a couple of bad batches. Through conversation with John Bishop (profiled here) I discovered that 36 hours is likely too long. Now I set the timer for 24 hours and then usually check and take out the jars after about 20. I haven’t had any spoiled batches for about 6 months.

Weekend Watching: Another Look at Dietary Guidelines

Conventional dietary wisdom tells us that we should limit intake of fat, and that saturated fat is the worst!

Right at the top of the Nutrition Facts panel on any of the processed food we buy is a declaration of its fat content: Total Fat, Saturated Fat, Trans Fat, Polyunsaturated Fat and Monounsaturated Fat.

Total Carbohydrate doesn’t even get second billing: it’s below both Cholesterol and Sodium.

There was a time when I was extremely grateful for the product at right, when I had recently been diagnosed with celiac disease.

Other cereals I had tried were gluten free, but that was the most you could say for them. They were not at all tasty. Chex cereals were the first ones made for the mass market that also were gluten-free, and Corn Chex was my favorite variety.

I ate it for breakfast almost every day, and as you can see on the label I definitely wasn’t getting too much fat, even with 2% milk. But each serving did have 33g of carbohydrates, even when I didn’t add any extra sugar.

Over just a few years it played a significant role in me gaining 40 lbs. and getting to Peak Lee.

Knowing that I had been on a diet that was rich in so-called “healthy whole grains” and yet was anything but healthy, when I started to run across messages challenging this dietary consensus I was open to at least trying a different approach.

Of course it was not without a bit of concern: after all, if I lost a bunch of weight but was setting myself up for heart disease, that wouldn’t be a net benefit.

That’s why I found it really helpful to have serious scientists like Dr. Peter Attia review the literature and outline what the research on diet and heart disease really says.

I think you’ll find this video fascinating, as I did. Watch it for yourself and let me know what you think in the comments.

If you doubt that it’s worth the 79 minutes to watch, I’ll provide a few bullet point highlights below.

Studies of Benedictine and Trappist monks, Navajo Indians, Irish immigrants to Boston, Swiss Alpine farmers and Maasai and other African pastoralists report no association of saturated fat to heart disease.
A 1957 study of 5,400 male employees of Western Electric Company compared the 15 percent who ate the most fat to the 15 percent who ate the least. “Worthy of comment, is the fact that of the 88 coronary cases, 14 have appeared in the high-fat intake group and 16 in the low-fat group.”
A follow-up study of the Western Electric cohort in 1981 found “The amount of saturated fatty acids in the diet was not significantly associated with the risk of death from CHD.”
The Minnesota Coronary Study, which involved 9,000 men and women whose diets could be strictly controlled because they were in mental institutions, found 269 deaths in the intervention group (with low saturated fat and cholesterol) and 206 deaths in the control group. The results, available in 1973, went unpublished for 16 years. Why? “We were disappointed in the way they turned out.”
2001 Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis involving 27 well-controlled randomized trials with 10,000 subjects followed for an average of three years each found No effect on longevity and No “significant effect on cardiovascular events.”
A second Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis in 2006 “Multiple risk factor interventions for primary prevention for coronary heart disease” with 900,000 patient years of observation concluded: “The pooled effects suggest multiple risk factor intervention has no effect on mortality.”

OK, now go back and watch the video. It’s a pretty compelling story.

What do you think?

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