Eating More Fat Can Help your Heart

AND Slim Down your JEANS!

(Bonus link: Eat that or Take this?)

By: Dr. Sarah LoBisco, ND (copyrighted by dr-lobisco.com)

Why are so many people still afraid of fat grams? Maybe it’s due to the popularity of those low fat diets in the 1980’s. However, those diets weren’t originally designed to be a weight loss tool. Instead, low fat diets were a public health statement on heart disease.

Ancel Keys was the first to link high fat diets to cardiovascular health in the late 1950s, but it was Nathan Pritkin who was probably the most well known advocate of a low fat diet. Although, he was saved from heart disease, it may have been for the over-looked reason that he also advocated for elimination of refined sugar, white flour, and all processed foods while increasing raw, un-processed whole foods. Still, the attention was placed on the low-fat aspect of his program.

Nathan may not have died from heart disease, but he did commit suicide when his dietary regime would not cure him of leukemia. Other followers also exhibited negative side effects from such a restricted diet including: low energy, difficulty in concentration, depression, weight gain, and mineral deficiencies.

Regardless of Nathan Pritkins’s other issues, by 1988, surgeon general C. Everett Koop was warning Americans that high fat diets were the cause of coronary heart disease, a stance that continues to affect public perception today. But, is this true? Let’s look at some statistics:

“Today heart disease causes at least 40% of all US deaths. If, as we have been told, heart disease results from the consumption of saturated fats, one would expect to find a corresponding increase in animal fat in the American diet. Actually, the reverse is true. During the sixty-year period from 1910 to 1970, the proportion of traditional animal fat in the American diet declined from 83% to 62%, and butter consumption plummeted from eighteen pounds per person per year to four.

During the past eighty years, dietary cholesterol intake has increased only 1%. During the same period the percentage of dietary vegetable oils in the form of margarine, shortening and refined oils increased about 400% while the consumption of sugar and processed foods increased about 60%.” -Mary Enig, PhD. & Sally Fallon.

In TJ Moore’s book, Heart Failure, the belief that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease is de-mythed. He explains how the results from the famous Farmington study could have been a manipulation by pharmaceutical companies to sell more statin drugs. Furthermore, other studies have supported his citations finding favor with Mediterranean diets over low fat, high carbohydrate ones. So, if fat isn’t related to heart disease, what is?

The new paradigm emerging by many functional and integrative medical practitioners is that inflammation is the underlying cause of heart disease. It is believed that cholesterol increases in arteries as the body’s healing tool to patch up the underlying pathology of damage created by this inflammation from various environmental and systemic imbalances. What this means is that blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like shooting the post man for delivering a foreclosure warning!

In holistic health, the focus has now shifted to what KINDS of fat are being consumed in the diet, rather than how much. Leading experts in nutrition such as Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Mark Hyman, and many others are now speaking out about how saturated fat has gotten a bad rap. Instead, the belief is that the main dietary contributors to chronic illnesses, including heart disease, are probably foods high in trans-fats and highly refined products.

Here are some roles of healthy saturated fats (from organic sources) in your body:

Heart health- eating saturated fat has shown to reduce the levels of Lp(a) in serum blood labs

Bone health – fats aid calcium absorption

Liver health – fat helps form bile salts for digestion

Lung Health- fat forms an important component of lung surfactant

Brain and nervous system health- your brain is mostly made of fat

Immune system health – certain short chain fatty acids have been shown to be antimicrobial

So, why is eating fat also important for your waist line? Fats, such as cholesterol, serve the important function of hormonal building blocks, aid in vitamin and mineral absorption, and that feeling of satiety and satisfaction after a meal. This leads to decreased cravings and better digestion. In fact, healthy fats can actually travel to the receptor sites on fat cells and trigger them to burn up stored energy! So, as far as biochemistry, the effect of fat on hormones and insulin is way more powerful than calories in weight maintenance.

Any diet will initially work for weight loss, because when you cut out one vital component you create deficiencies which cause the initial breakdown of muscle tissue and decrease water weight. However, invariably, the body will rebel and symptoms of nutrient deficiencies will pop up as signals, such as cravings, to more severe signs, in order to get you to pay attention.

So, what’s the best way to eat for heart and weight? A diet rich in whole, real, un-processed foods, high in vegetables and phytonutrients, low in inflammation producing foods. As far as what fats to included, I encourage you to follow the link in my reference section by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. In part three, she reviews the important fats and their functions and which fats to avoid. I also encourage you to review my previous articles on hormones, weight loss, and cholesterol for reasons that further explain how eating fat is good for you. Furthermore, I have posted additional articles at Saratoga.com that have reviewed the topic of cholesterol, weight loss, and hormones.

In health,
Dr. Sarah

References:

American Heart Association. Know your Fats. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=532

Jeffrey Bland, Phd. Lecture at UBCNM. February 2009.

Dr. Mark Hyman. Ultra Metabolsm

Mary Enig, PhD & Sally Fallon. The Truth about Saturated Fats: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2002/08/17/saturated-fat1.aspx

Dr. Joseph Mercola. Diet & Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/10/25/d

Dr. Joseph Mercola. 7 Reasons to Eat More Saturated Fat: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/09/22/7

TJ Moore. THE CHOLESTEROL MYTH. The-Atlantic, VOL:v264, ISS:n3, DATE: Sept 1989, PAGE:37(25), ISSN: 0276-9077 , ATMOA. COPYRIGHT The

An article drawn from Thomas J. Moore’s book , Heart Failure, published by Random House, Inc.