Heath Nut My story part 4 Saturated Fat

Fat is your friend. The brain thrives on a fat-rich, low-carbohydrate diet. David Perlmutter
Your levels of cholesterol are primarily dependent on your own body's production rather than the result of eating animal fats. Moreover, some forms of cholesterol are heart healthy. Harley Pasternak
Thin people are beautiful, but fat people are adorable. Jackie Gleason

Note:  This post is not meant to be medical advice.  It is only my experience with and observations about saturated fat.  Always include your doctor in the discussion before you make changes.  

     I was going to write one more post about my food journey in this Health Nut series, but when I was watching a documentary about diets and saw a doctor deriding folks who put butter in their coffee--thereby endangering their lives with saturated fat, I got a little angry. The Low Fat Diet is such an old story that doesn't hold water--it never did and I get tired of hearing it. I decided that saturated fat needed its own post.

     So where did all this hoopla about cholesterol and saturated fat come from?  Not from a distinguished research team who did studies and trials on the effects of fat on people, but from only one man, Ancel Keys. Certainly one man can have a good idea that changes the world, but one person can also be totally wrong and use the power of his or her personality to persuade others...cult leaders are an example.  By studying eating habits in different nations, Mr. Keys became utterly convinced that the epidemic of heart disease was caused by saturated fat and cholesterol.  He wasn't a doctor but a an aggressive and persuasive scientist who pushed his findings until he got the ear of the World Health Organization and the American heart Association.  Once the medical community was on board Ancel's ship, the government changed its diet guidelines and food pyramid while the food industry was revolutionized, totally changing our heath and our way of eating.  Opposing opinions to the saturated fat theory were silenced or ignored but today there those who dispute Mr. Keys' findings saying that he cherry picked his data, while others still defend him. However, I will leave that for now and focus on my own experiences with and observations about saturate fats.

     I have questions.  Since heart disease was a rare condition in the early 1900's and became the number one killer by 1950, why did Mr. Keys blame the fats?  While there were big changes to the American diet by then such as an increased intake of sugar, white flour and processed food, the dietary fat intake was pretty much the way it had always been.  Why was it suddenly the culprit? If we look at our ancestors--and I don't mean the paleolithic cavemen types--but our immediate ancestors, what where they eating during the decades of virtually no heart disease?  I know that my grandparents and beyond were mostly farmers.  Farmers ate food they raised themselves and most weren't vegans.  They ate bacon and butter, red meat and lard.  Have you ever been to a hog butchering? I have.  While the men dressed out the meat, the ladies took care of the lard rendering.  We cut the pork fat --and there was a lot of it-- into little pieces and placed it in a large cast iron kettle over a fire in the yard, where it was cooked down.  It took a long time and required a lot of pot stirring and gossiping, but in the end we wound up with a pot full of lard and a bi-product of "cracklin's (think pork skins.) which was considered a delicious snack.  The lard was packaged up and put in the freezer along with the meat and it was used to cook with.  When I got married and moved South near my husbands people, you could buy lard in the grocery store and every kitchen had a canister for bacon grease that had a special straining lid. No one threw away bacon grease!  And everyone ate bacon...except for maybe me.

     Then all of that started to change after Ancel Keys research. Doctor's prescribed low fat diets. The food industry heavily advertised low fat.  It was suggested that you drink 2% milk with your low fat cake--cake made with applesauce instead of butter.  Butter had to give way to margarine; to cut back further on fat there was diet margarine. Lard was replaced by Crisco and vegetable oil. They even made turkey bacon! No one considered it harmful to remove fat from foods, increasing the carbohydrate content or that margarine contained a myriad of strange  ingredients including trans-fat. 

     Since I was a chronic dieter I got 100% on board with the low fat movement. I bought the vegetable oils but used them sparingly; I cooked stir fry in chicken broth. I used low fat salad dressing (salads will make you skinny, right? No. They only made me hungry for cheeseburgers!) I ate diet margarine, and bought skinless, boneless meat and cut back on eggs. I used low fat coffee creamer and anything else I could get low fat. Oh yeah! low fat cheese! (yuck!)There was no grease clogging up the stove vent in my kitchen!  The main thing I remember about those decades was that I was always hungry. Always. Hungry. I have never forgotten the hunger and every time I see a misinformed doctor or diet guru talk about low fat, I still get a clutch in the gut.  

     So what did all that low fat dieting do for me? Lose weight? No. Create delicious food? No. Satisfying meals? No. Improve my mood and energy? No. Lower cholesterol? NO! Really, the answer to that one is no.

     I started rebelling in small ways in the early 90's while at a weight watcher's meeting the leader said we should eat the egg whites and throw away the yolks because the whites have a substance that lowers cholesterol.  What? Really? I had an epiphany. I looked around the room at the others listening in rapt attention and realized that they didn't get what I just got. The egg white cancels out the cholesterol in the yolk! GOD DONE TOOK CARE OF THE EGG! I started eating eggs again.

      Not long after I gave up on weight watchers, I was scolded by a doctor for high cholesterol. I couldn't believe it. This is when I was on a plant based diet, eating a lot of rice with a little fish.  She put me on a statin which caused side effects I couldn't live with so I stopped taking it.  Then I reread Dr Adkin's Diet Revolution (I read it once before the low fat era).  He said that you don't get cholesterol by eating it. I had another epiphany!  Wait! Beef has cholesterol.  What does beef cattle eat?  Other beef? NO! Grains! Carbs! Beef are fed grains! To fatten them up! Do you get it?  I hope you're getting it.  That is when I stopped the diet margarine and started...eating... butter!  Then about 7 years ago I learned that the vegetable oils that were low in cholesterol are too high in Omega 6 which are dangerous to the heart and they were heavily processed to boot.  I was a faithful canola oil user!  Well, I knocked that off and bought some olive oil.  Later I started using coconut oil (a super food with healing properties) and now I mainly use avocado oil--lots of it. Yes I hear you. That is SATURATED FAT!  Yes'm it is.

      So what has saturated fat done for me?  My cholesterol is normal--really it is.  All the time. I stopped gaining weight and started very slowly losing.  I eat healthy, yummy food. I actually cook avoiding fast or processed food. I have good moods and energy. I AM NOT HUNGRY!  I repeat! I am not hungry!  So I eat less.  I don't get up starving so I can skip breakfast.  I never liked to eat in the morning and I no longer listen to the misinformed push the idea that breakfast is the best meal of the day.  

      So that is my spiel. I am only one woman who's not a scientist or doctor, so I don't want to push this on anyone.  I just hope this makes you think or check out the links below or open up discussions with your doctor and love ones.  

      Then again, feel free to dismiss all this and just enjoy the picture.

      And yes, it's true. I put butter in my coffee.

It happened in Mexico Pencil 3 x 4

https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(14)00354-4/fulltext
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat-good-or-bad#section2
https://www.makelifenatural.net/superfood-coconut-oil-30-uses-benefits/

                                   

Health Nut My story Part 3 Exercise

Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backwards, lying down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck. Unknown
If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all. Joey Adams
Physical activity is an excellent stress-buster and provides other health benefits as well. It also can improve your mood and self image. Jon Wickham

Note:  This post is not meant to be medical advice.  It is only my experience about diet and exercise.  Before you try anything new or stop what you are doing, check with your doctor first.                                                                  

This is post # 3 in my "Health Nut" series and tonight I want to talk about exercise and what a part it had in my life--what I expected from it, benefits I did and didn't get and even harm I may have done to myself.

I have exercised since I was young. I don't remember exactly when I got the idea that if you want to lose weight you need to exercise, but I believed it wholeheartedly. Every time I tried to lose weight I developed an exercise program to go along with the low calorie, low fat eating program I was on. For 30 years I was a chronic dieter--and exerciser. I would starve myself, following an eating plan given to me by the doctor or that I found in a magazine. (In the early days it was believed that one should reduced their calorie intake to 800 a day.)

When I was young and healthy I would take the weight off fairly easily. Little did I know that I was slowing down my metabolism a little during every diet. The body is designed to do that to preserve one's life in a famine. So when I would resume eating normally the weight would come back with reinforcements along with the guilt and insurmountable self loathing. I eventually reached a point I couldn't continue with the diets but I continued exercising hoping that it would magically do the trick.

I have learned something very important. Exercise will not make a girl skinny. Certainly a person can see an initial weight drop of 10 to 20 pounds when they start an exercise program but it rarely goes beyond that. The body puts a halt on the weight loss to protect itself. It's like.. if slightly pudgy office clerk takes a job bucking hay, even though he ate well, he might tone up and lose some flab right away but he won't continue with that because if the hard work made him lose weight continuously then he would waste away, so his body adjusts the metabolism to to stop the fat burn. In that light I realize that my excessive exercising also contributed to the demise of my metabolism.

I believed in the simple formula of calories in and calories out. Many diet gurus and even doctors still believe in that today. Fitbit shows how many calories you burn in a day like that is important information. All I had to do is to line up how many calories I eat with how many I expend in exercise and like magic I will get skinny, right?. It's is not that simple. If the calories are a chocolate bar it will spike the insulin level; to get rid of the high glucose the body turns it into fat, but if the calories are a handful of almonds the body treats the calories differently. Our complicated bodies are always adjusting hormones and metabolism to protect itself and keep us as healthy as possible. It's like the body fights weight loss on every corner.

Over the years I did calisthenics, isometrics, jazzercise, biking, swimming and walking as well as exercise machines and exercise classes and gym memberships, And aerobic dance-- I loved that but hated walking--I hated walking so much I forced myself to walk more! After all the doctors and Oprah said it's the best form of exercise for us, right? I had two total knee and one hip replacements because this heavy girl forced herself to walk; (I believe today that my body was telling me that the walking was harming me, that's why I hated it.). Before the surgeries, I was unable to stand so I exercised on the floor or in bed or in a chair. To not exercise was unthinkable and to do any less than an hour 5 times a week was cheating.

I am not anti-exercise. I still do it today but some days it's just a few stretches, and other days it's working in the garden. Or I may go after the punching bag or stair stepper. Heck heavy house work counts as exercise! I no longer believe that a 90 minute routine benefits me in any way. Exercise is very good for your whole body--brain, heart, lungs, skin, muscle, mood and bones. I believe the life time of exercise I practiced is one of the reasons for my good health with low blood pressure and resting heart rate. In fact, not exercising can send a person down the road of ill health. Perhaps exercise can aid weight loss by supporting a healthy and strong body, but IT WILL NOT MAKE US LOSE MEANINGFUL WEIGHT over the long haul! Anyway it didn't for me. So Exercise because it's good for you and because it makes you feel good. But be kind to yourself and don't expect it to do what it wasn't designed to do..

Petunia Oil 8 x 10

Sorry. To console you I am going to share my baby pig! Stay tuned for more installments in Health Nut.