John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, isn't afraid of the fat. Are you? If the answer is yes you might want to take John's advice. Trust him. He's not a doctor.
Boys and girls, I stand before you, naked as a razor.
No it's ok, I'm not auditioning for a new career in pornography. Not yet anyway.
I am only metaphorically naked, Officer.
However, if I was naked you'd be seeing a man with around 14% body fat. Delicious.
We all have a % of our bodies that is fat. Athletes are probably under 8%. A healthy level is somewhere between 12% and 18%. When I was three and a half stone overweight and lived off lentils, brown rice, wholemeal and polyunsaturated everything I was up around 27%. Well done me, eh!
When I carried the most fat on my modest frame I was on a very low fat diet. Today, about 60% of my calories are from fat, perhaps even more. You’re looking at a dude who puts slices of organic grass-fed butter on a salad. I eat thick double cream and I fry in lard or coconut oil. It was changing to a diet higher in fat that helped me lose so much body fat. Don’t tell your doctor. They’ll freak out. But this has happened to many, many people.
We’ve been brainwashed about fat. We think it is all the same and all of it is really bad for us. Fat makes you fat, right?
No. Wrong.
The word fat has got us all messed up. Perhaps it’s because it is the same word used in two different contexts that we conflate them to mean the same thing.
We all need to eat fat. Fat is very good for us, as is that other bogey man, cholesterol. Most of your brain is made up of cholesterol.
For most of human existence on earth we have actively sought out fat for its nutrition. My Grandma always used to tell us to eat the fat on our chops because it was good for us. Native cultures the world over treasure animal fat, or in the tropical regions, coconut fat and base their diets on it. In the west, for some reason, we think low fat spread is better. Oooh we’re so clever.
We’ve decided that eating lots of saturated animal fat gives us a heart attack despite the fact that cultures which base their diet on such fats have very low levels of heart disease. This includes the French who, along with eating the most saturated fat, smoke a lot and do the least exercise in Europe. But still, their rates of heart disease are much lower than in the UK. Indeed, the region with the lowest heart disease is Gascogny, an area famous for its duck dishes. They eat heart-stopping amounts of duck fat and hey, surprise, surprise, it keeps them healthy. What have you got to say about that, doctor? Meanwhile, in UK and USA we obsess about polyunsaturated vegetable oils, fear saturated animal fat and yet die from heart disease in far greater numbers.
Amazingly, when this country ate only animal fat, the rates of degenerative diseases were much lower than today. In the mid to late Victorian period, they died of violent trauma and bacterial infection, not heart attacks and strokes. The working class lived as long as they do today – well into their 70s. Look at any Victorian graveyard and you’ll see lots of people dying at 75 and older. They survived without any healthy eating advice, they didn’t get a finger wagged at them by their doctor fresh out of college with a degree in medicine, they didn’t watch lifestyle programmes on TV nor did they worry that eating butter would clog their arteries and want to eat factory-made low-fat gloop instead. They would have thought our low fat obsession was insane and they’d have been right.
I wager none of us know why low fat is supposed to be good and why saturated fat is bad. We have no idea what cholesterol is or what is does. All we know about fat is one word and one word only. Clog. Somehow, by cultural osmosis and constant healthy eating propaganda, the word clog has come to be used almost exclusively with the word fat and the word arteries. Clogged arteries is the full extent of most of our knowledge about fat and what it does and even then we don’t know how or why.
It is utter rubbish. We have become fearful of fat for no reason at all. Fat is not the culprit for our obesity and ill health. We eat less and less fat and less and less saturated fat and yet get fatter and fatter. Well done us! Yet still the medical establishment won’t give way on this issue. They are wrong. It is self evident.
When you eat good quality animal fat, it slows your digestion down and suppresses your appetite. When you base it on carbohydrate the opposite happens. It is really easy to over-eat carbs and almost impossible to overeat fat because you feel sick if you do.
But not all fat is the same. Fat from animals raised intensively on wheat and soya has higher levels of omega 6 and lower omega 3. You want to avoid this because it promotes inflammation in your body and makes you vulnerable to all sorts of diseases, aches and pains. This is nothing compared to what all that super healthy vegetable oil does. Stuff like soya or corn oil. I suggest you read Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint for a great account of what these supposedly healthy oils do to us. They are, in essence, rancid and slowly poison us. Well why wouldn’t they? They are industrially produced oils, not some eco-lovely natural wholefood shop dreadlocky type goodness.
There always have been researchers, doctors, scientists and nutritionists who have opposed the healthy eating orthodoxy and the fat-based insanity. It has suited several industries very well that we shifted our diet away from animal fat to vegetable fats and carbs. The vegetable shortening fat lobby, along with the soya and pharmaceutical lobby, have made billions from it. This doesn’t mean it is right. Look around you, how do you think we’re all doing on it?
Your take home point today is this; stop being afraid of saturated animal fat. Do you think we evolved to eat health food? Do you think our hunter-gatherer ancestors roamed the land looking for Flora margarine or reduced fat digestive biscuits? No, they lived off fish, meat, animal fat and some vegetation. We are those people. That is what we evolved to eat. So bloody well eat it. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.