Saturated Fat: What to Do?

One of the biggest areas of dietary confusion today is whether saturated fat is bad for us or not. For the most part, conventional medical thought remains firmly in the “saturated fat is bad for you” corner, while a growing number of people feel that not only is the jury still out on saturated fat intake, it may even have health benefits.

Block This

Part 2 of a 2-part series

The use of fat and starch blocking diet aids is insanely counter-intuitive to me. I spend my life trying to get more nutrition into people, not less. Remember, anything that blocks the digestion and absorption of a macronutrient will also tend to block the absorption of micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals.

With the fat blocker Alli, the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K is impaired. That’s why when taking it, users are instructed to be sure to take a multivitamin at night (away from the time you took the drug). If you follow the whole Alli program, you eat no more than 15 g of fat per meal.

Block This

Part 1 of a 2 Part Series

In a world where the numbers of overweight and obese people only continue to climb, many people are desperate for any help they can get with weight loss. Sure, most people can lose weight following a low carb, or conversely, a low calorie, low fat diet — for a little while anyway. But long-term compliance continues to elude many people. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could eat all the carbs or all the fat you wanted and not gain weight?

That’s the allure of a category of newer dietary supplements called starch blockers, and the over-the-counter fat blocker called Alli. The idea is, “Go ahead and eat the foods you like, just keep them from breaking down and make them pass right through, so you don’t absorb the calories.”

First, just to give you a little background… Starch blockers are substances that stop the digestion of starches by blocking one of the enzymes that break them down. For example, a prescription drug for diabetics called acarbose (Precose) blocks the enzyme called alpha-glucosidase.

Rethinking the Risk of Saturated Fat

Sometimes you have to take a step back before you can move forward. Lets review the relationship of saturated fats (fats from animal products and palm and coconut oils) to heart disease. Back in the 1950s we were told to eat corn and sunflower oils as healthy alternatives to saturated fat. As our consumption of these polyunsaturated fats rose, so did the rate of heart disease.

Food companies developed new “non-fat” versions of foods that replaced saturated fats (and other fats) with carbohydrates — and heart disease flourished. The net result was a population scared of saturated fat, yet driving themselves to diabetes and heart disease in record numbers by eating an abundance of high glycemic carbohydrates and processed food.

Getting Over Fear of Fat

We’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in our practice — many people are still afraid to eat fat. Even those who are experiencing the benefits of a low-carb, higher-fat diet can’t seem to make the change without having some guilt or concern about the butter on their sautéed vegetables or the cholesterol in their steamed shrimp.

I appreciate the concern very much. People should take seriously the tsunami of diabetes and heart disease that can result from a poor diet unless they take quick and serious action. A preventive diet is right up there with not smoking and getting enough exercise in avoiding these life-threatening health risks.

In implementing a healthier diet, the problem of course is that the message from the medical establishment has changed so many times over the years, that people are not sure what to believe.

When Will Low Fat Diets Go Away?

For the average person, the changes we’ve seen as to how diet contributes to heart disease have been interesting, but for many people they have also been exhausting and confusing.

For two decades we were taught that diets high in fat and cholesterol contribute to heart disease; this teaching has been dubbed the “diet-heart hypothesis.” Low fat diets were recommended by every large health organization, and people adopted the low fat way of life. There was only one problem — heart disease rates did not drop. They continued to climb.

Over the years, the diet-heart hypothesis has been crumbling one wall at a time. First, we learned that only one type of fat clearly contributes to heart disease, and that some oils even have health benefits. So trans-fats are out and olive oil is in.