How Sweet It Isn’t: What happened to me when I gave up sugar – Part 3

…continued from September 1/2014

infographic-sugarsI notice that my appetite has diminished. I grew up a farm girl and I’ve always had the appetite of a hired hand, proudly able to keep up with my brother or my dad when it comes to putting away a piled up plate of food. I am also less prone to snacking in the evenings.

And the scale continues to show it. Five months into the “experiment” I am down 30 pounds.

I notice my knees no longer crackle when I climb stairs, something that I had heard off and on since my 20’s. It makes sense. Sugar causes inflammation, which leads to lots of debilitating diseases like arthritis, perhaps even crackling knees!

I also notice that I have no pain. I spend one weekend moving ten pickup truck loads of furniture with my daughter. The old me would have been unable to get out of bed the next day with stiffness and soreness from using muscles that are usually inert. But I have no pain.

I have not had a headache, backache or any other body-part-ache since stopping sugar. I no longer keep over the counter pain medication in my home. It is not relevant.

Before stopping sugar I had done a hormone profile in an effort to address post-menopausal symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats. Four of the five hormones they measure were so low they didn’t register. I didn’t know it because I forgot to get my results until June. When I went for the results I suggested that I should redo the profile given that I was feeling so different. We did another profile.

The results were astonishing. All my hormones were in the middle of the normal range. My health care professional was astounded that removing sugar could make such a profound difference.

I am very happy about my own results but also sad to know that so many women are on risky Hormone Replacement Therapy when one simple change in their diets could bring them relief. And so many other benefits.

Altogether I lost 35 pounds, stabilizing in the last six months at the ideal weight for my height, a goal I have only achieved a couple times in my life and with great effort. This has been virtually effortless. My goal was not weight loss but I am happy to experience that benefit.

I am amazed by my energy. My husband says, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” Right now, I have to say 30! That is almost half my age. I know I can outrun and outwork most 30-year-olds. I keep up with my granddaughters (grandtoys) biking and hiking.

People often comment that I don’t look like a grandmother. I’ve started to reply, “I eat right” and I am amazed by how people are taken aback at this simple mantra.

Many people say, “Oh, I could never give up sugar!” I used to think that too.

I didn’t do it overnight. For years I was oblivious to the need for eliminating sugar, believing cutting back was good enough. It was a good start and looking back, it prepared me for quitting. It simply wasn’t enough.

I learned that it doesn’t take much of this poison to cause crazy things to happen to your body. I never would have experienced all those benefits if I had not given up sugar entirely.

You might have great success simply by cutting down on sugar. I have to give it up because I can’t eat just one cookie; I need the whole bag. I can’t eat a two-inch piece of cake; it ends up being six inches! Remember my doughnut story? I am a sugar addict. One doesn’t need to drink alcohol to be an alcoholic. (Incidentally, I suspect alcoholism is a sugar addiction).

Currently, sugar has little appeal. In fact, I think it stinks. I never thought sugar smelled but since I’m off it I can smell a chemical/plastic odor when I’m in the presence of doughnuts, candy or cake.

I now find sweet fruits like pineapple, grapes and ripe bananas too sweet to eat. In the last few months, I’ve eaten less fruit. Mostly, it’s a snack or a treat once or twice a day. I usually gorge on in-season fruits like cherries. We’ll see if I have the same appetite for them this year.

Many people ask me about sugar substitutes. I avoid them (the sugar substitutes, not the people asking me!) as they all fall under the processed food category. There is evidence that the body doesn’t quite know what to do with fake sugars (and other fake foods). They are suspected of contributing to, not preventing, as they claim, obesity. Even more alarming, sugar substitutes are implicit in the diabetes epidemic.

“What about in your tea and coffee?” I am frequently asked. I never was a coffee fan and I drink herbal teas that have an implied sweetness like mint or some of the fruit blends, without honey or sugar. I most often drink hot water with lemon. Lemon helps the liver (which is affected by sugar and other chemicals in our food and water.) If you sweeten your beverages, gradually cut back then switch to a small amount of stevia, maple syrup or honey. Eventually you will do without.

“I’m okay. I drink Diet Coke,“ some folks assure me if the topic of sugar arises. I don’t always get into it but they think it’s a good thing to have sugar-free drinks. I do not. Aspartame is a known neurotoxin. Evidence points to its contribution to Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, even some cases of Parkinson’s Disease.

Trading one toxin for another possibly more dangerous toxin does not make sense. Yet my friends send me recipes calling for Sucralose or Cool Whip (fake fat with fake sugar) and they drink Diet Coke! (If it’s not diet, it might be sweetened with high fructose corn syrup another unfood that the body doesn’t know how to process. All sodas contain phosphoric acid, which essentially leeches calcium from your bones).

One of the most dangerous things about sugar is that it is everywhere, in almost every processed food. When we embraced low-fat diets, manufacturers substituted sugar for the fat. To avoid sugar successfully, one must avoid processed foods. They may not seem to have much sugar but manufacturers trick us by using several different sugars. That way, they appear lower down on the ingredients list, leading the consumer to believe that sugar is not the main ingredient, when in fact, it is.

How much sugar is too much? Recently the World Health Organization slashed their recommended limit of sugar calories to 5% from 10% of the diet. The new levels equate to three teaspoons for women and five for men per day. For perspective, a bowl of cereal or a half-cup serving of yogurt typically contain six teaspoons of sugar. A can of Coke has ten teaspoons of sugar, two days’ allotment for men, three days’ for women!

The average North American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar each day; the average child, 32 teaspoons each day! Then we wonder about the scary cancer statistics threatening that one in two of us will develop cancer in our lives.

Why don’t these stats come partnered with the message that sugar feeds cancer and that when sugar is removed from the diet, tumors shrink? Why? Because food manufacturers and lobbyists don’t want consumers to know that their products are killing them.

We never hear that cutting sugar decreases our risk of heart disease because inflammation, (not cholesterol) is the cause of heart disease. Sugar causes inflammation. And statin drugs (anti-cholesterol) are some of the most profitable pharmaceuticals invented, so nobody wants to step forward to say “stop eating sugar and you won’t need this medication”.

Astoundingly, the sickness care business is oblivious to sugar’s role in the mushrooming diabetes rates, affecting younger and younger children. Type II diabetes was once called “adult-onset diabetes” but so many kids have it, that name no longer accurately describes the condition. Sadly, much money is made on diabetes treatments and monitoring, and the health companies aren’t about to start telling us the truth about why we have diabetes.

I believe most cases of diabetes could be prevented if we eliminated processed food and sugar from the diet. A few years ago an experiment was conducted at the London Zoo. A number of volunteers were confined to the zoo and fed what a gorilla would eat: up to ten kilograms of raw fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts each day. After one month the results were incredible. All participants lost weight. Many had to get off their medications for diabetes and heart disease. They enjoyed many other surprising health benefits.

Some online searching will reveal many success stories of people going back to eating the way nature intended: whole real food. People have cured themselves of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the big killers, and a host of other ailments by adjusting their diet. We don’t hear about these miracles because there is no money to be made treating disease with food.

Not every eating plan works for every person. You can’t go wrong with eating simple foods, mostly raw, mostly plants and not too much of anything.

I strongly recommend you weed out the processed sugar (and even the fruit sugar if you’re overdoing it). I suspect you will be surprised and delighted with the changes you’ll see in your body and how you feel in general.

I am personally astounded by the magnitude of the changes in my body and overall feeling of good health and energy simply because I consciously eliminated processed sugar from my diet.

Good health is a journey. We are all on different places on the path. I feel like I am many steps closer to my goal of optimum health because I gave up sugar. Knowing what I know now, I am convinced I will never go back to consuming copious amounts of sugar like I once did.

I have discovered that sugar isn’t so sweet after all.

How Sweet It Isn’t: What happened to me when I gave up sugar – Part 1

“For my daughter’s recent cookbook, I wrote my sugar story.

 I promised not to share it with my readers until her book was released.
Buy it here
rachelscookbook
Now here is my story. (It’s long so we’ve broken it into 3 segments.)
I would love to hear about your struggles/victories over sugar!”

 

 

My Year Without Sugar and How my Body Reacted

Truly, it’s not surprising that I have a sugar addiction.

It is surprising to me that I refer to it now as an addiction. Like any addict I lived in denial for years.

From a very young age, my loving paternal grandmother showered me with sugar. She entered puberty at the onset of the Great Depression, with its scarcity of sugar. The greatest gift she could give was food, especially sugar.

The only sweetener she had regular access to growing up was honey and that was reserved for medicinal purposes. My great-grandmother was a closet alcoholic so any sugar that came into the house was diverted to a crock in her bedroom for fermenting fruit.

Then came World War II and the rationing of sugar. By then Grandma was married, poor, and homesteading. Grandpa demonstrated his love by keeping bees, which ensured an extra large sugar ration (for the bees) and abundant honey (for Grandma).

By the time I was born, my immediate ancestors were as well off as they had ever been. And that meant abundant food. Not fancy food. Mostly homegrown food. But the one thing that was prevalent was sugar.

Do you know how easy it is to shower (grand)children with sugar love?

Grandma always served three desserts. Desserts were planned and prepared long before the main meal. She might serve chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream and raspberry Jello. Or she would offer a choice of two kinds of pie, always apple, and sometimes raisin, cherry, or saskatoon (or a slice of each) with ice cream. She may also have had homemade cookies in case you didn’t get enough sugar. And there was nothing like a cup of hot chocolate to soothe the soul!

Sunday after church we would stop at the North Hill Store where we each got to spend one of our two dimes; the first dime had already fallen dutifully into the collection plate. We often chose a bag of penny candy painstakingly selected and ceremoniously placed into the tiny paper bag by Mr. LaBarre. He had a soft spot for us as we were purportedly well-behaved for children, and he would sneak in an extra piece or two of our favourites. Sometimes we would spend our money on a cream soda, orange or grape crush and a bag of chips or a chocolate bar.

Looking back it’s not at all surprising that I associate sugar with pleasure. Grandma was devoted to me and she showered me with love and sugar. Love and sugar go together. Pleasure!

Much of my energy as a child went into securing sugar. Within moments I spent all found-money at the corner store. I invariably inhaled my portions; my brother would slowly savour his sweets or even hoard them for later, which meant that I had to concentrate on how I might manipulate the treasure from his greedy grip. Occasionally that would result in his sharing or even surrendering entirely. (Not likely).

I was a sugar pig.

Processed food became mainstream when I was a child. Like other 60’s mothers, my mother bought into their promise of convenience, although her limited budget prohibited her from completely stocking our shelves with junk. Kool-aid, Tang, and cereal (with toys inside the boxes) were all part of our diet, at least sporadically.

Luckily we were poor and we grew our own vegetables, raised our own eggs, picked and put-up wild berries, and supplemented our homegrown chicken diet with meat from the odd deer that Dad would bag in the fall.

I developed a taste for fresh vegetables from the garden. A favorite activity was playing hide and seek in a pea patch on a hot afternoon. I would munch on peas while I hid or even as seeker, (one can become quite famished playing hide and seek!)

I liked the raspberry patch even more. As sweet as fresh peas can be, there’s nothing like ripe raspberries picked while the dew still clings like blobs of transparent mercury on the knobby surface of the berry. They’re especially good when they’ve been sun-warmed for a couple hours. Heaven is gumming a handful of raspberries (not chewing to avoid lodging their tiny seeds into your teeth) and letting the sweet syrup trickle down your throat.

My infatuation for sugar led to my childhood dream for the future: that I would live in Calgary (check), that I would have my own car (check) and the back seat would be filled with cinnamon buns and chocolate bars! I’ve likely eaten enough chocolate bars to fill many backseats!

By the time I turn 21, I am married, pregnant with my second daughter. I’m in Safeway with my toddler in the cart. In the produce department I admire the fresh peaches. But alas! They are expensive. I begin to push away.

I look into my cart.

I see doughnuts. I see cookies.

Like a bolt of lightning I am struck by the notion that if I put back the junk, I can afford the peaches.

That epiphany changes the course of my shopping forever. I begin allocating more of my grocery budget to fresh whole food. I bake our treats, usually substituting some whole grain flour for the white flour and cutting the sugar at least in half. Nobody ever notices. If they do they don’t say anything or stop eating what I make.

I actively guard my children from too much sugar. It‘s not always easy in the face of my Grandma (whose sugar showering continues with my children) and my in-laws, who are of the same generation as my grandma. I am often accused of being a mean mom when I forbid sugar or even when I simply limit it.

“Awww!” The guilty (great-)grandparent whines when I declare “no sugar to be sent home!”

“I just made these lovely squares.” (to child) “You like the mocha balls, don’t you?”

I remember once getting into the car after visiting Grandma and my girls are giggling in the back seat. What’s so funny? Despite my orders that the girls are not to have candy, Grandma has sneaked them each a chocolate bar as we slipped out the door.

I grouse but inside I smile because I know exactly how those girls feel. I know the feeling of being in cahoots with Grandma. I know that a loving heart committed the crime. I know the rush of pleasure: love in a sweet package!

Even if sugar is poison, is it really a sin when it comes from such great love?

At their dad’s parents’ house, cookies, cakes, and squares are served up to five times per day. (Mid-morning coffee, dessert at noon, mid-afternoon snack, dessert at supper, and bedtime snack!) Only breakfast doesn’t include them but sugar is well-represented with toast and jam, pancakes and syrup, and/or porridge with brown sugar.

I remember stuffing myself so full at their Sunday dinners my stomach would protest painfully. My sister-in-law would hold her abdomen and cry in agony, “I am so full!” Our gluttony often struck me as hypocritical in this evangelical Christian home. But I didn’t stop.

My girls’ grandpa thought bonding time with his granddaughters was a trip to the Co-op coffee shop for a long john (a huge block of a donut covered in chocolate or maple icing). They did too.

I saw them developing the same addiction to sugar that afflicted me. One long john contained more than their full day’s allowance of sugar, fat and calories and contributed almost no nutrition.

But I couldn’t really blame them for their attraction to doughnuts…

…..continued next week

Do or D-I-E-T

dietDiet has two distinct meanings today. We tend to think only of “restrictive (in some way) plans for the purpose of weight loss”.

Diet also (perhaps more correctly) means “a way of eating” from the Greek word ,diaita meaning a “way of life”.

There’s a clue. To be successful we need only to seek food that supports our desired way of life.

And there lies the problems with diets, of the former connotation. They don’t work because they are the antithesis of “a way of life”.

Let’s explore: D-I-E-T

D: Deprivation, not generally an ingredient in success!

When I used to decide to “go on a diet” to “lose a few pounds” the first thing that happened was intense cravings for the very foods that I had foresworn. I’d scour the cupboards looking for partial bags of chocolate chips or go spelunking in the freezer for a forgotten bag of Christmas cookies.

Prohibition doesn’t work. Saying you can’t have it is entirely the wrong approach.

I know that bread bloats me, makes me feel like I have a rock in my gut, and makes the scale go up as much as eight pounds. My body is telling me bread is poison.

I no longer “can’t have bread”. I “choose” not to eat bread because I would rather not experience those symptoms. That attitude adjustment has made it easier to avoid bread.

Diets don’t work because they start with deprivation.

I: Impossible: most diets are impossible to sustain, contradicting the age-old wisdom that what we eat is integral to the fabric of our lives, diaita!

Diets fail to help people reconnect to their food. Sustainability becomes impossible.

Many popular diets are effective until the restrictions are lifted and their clients find themselves back on the weight-loss roller coaster.

Diet companies make billions of dollars each year selling their products. They have no motivation to help you understand why you overeat. If you knew the secrets, they would lose your future business.

Shareholders would not be Impressed! If you have troubles sticking to a diet, you’re not alone. They are impossible!

 E: Elusive: the goal is elusive because it’s the wrong target.

We are not sick because we’re fat. We’re fat because we’re sick.

Weight loss isn’t the goal. It’s the by-product of improving our health.

We have poisoned and continue to poison ourselves on many fronts. Our food, air, and water assault our systems continuously. Our bodies are ill-equipped for the constant bombardment.

When we diet and lose weight, we often feel lousy or downright sick as the toxins leave their fat-cell barracks. Without understanding the process, dieters give up when they have these symptoms. Knowing why they feel distress can help them persevere to the rewards of good health.

If your weight loss goals are elusive adjust your target. Cultivate an environment of good health and the pounds will fall away.

T: Temporary. Most diets simply can’t last.

Many diets impose limits all but guaranteeing participants will fail. Especially grievous are the meal replacement programs.  Dieters struggle to eat in the real world. Instead of blindly replacing meals, “drinking” their calories they would benefit from learning more about making healthy choices.

Ironically, most meal replacements are rife with sugar, an addictive drug for those trying to be healthy and reach a healthy weight.

Sadly, there’s simply too much money at stake for diets to go the way of the dodo. If people knew about diaita , the secret they truly hunger for, the diet industry would suffer greatly.

But then perhaps demand for organic produce would rise and the economy would make up for lost diet revenue. One can dream!

“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we diet!”

Is this your New Year’s vow, year after year?

If D-I-E-T as a “restrictive eating plan for the purpose of losing weight” is in your lexicon, I urge you to rethink your approach. Choose a way of life, a diaita. Your eating will follow and your body will repair itself.

Finally, here are a few Tips for Adopting a Better Diet:

  1. One thing. Don’t try to change decades of bad habits in one day/week/month. Pick one new thing at a time. It can be “eat more fruit” or “eat more salad” or “replace chips with popcorn”.  Everybody can do one thing. Then pick another. In no time your bad habits are changed.
  2. Choose food that is processed as little as possible. Cooking, freezing, drying are all examples of processing though some are less damaging to food than others.
  3. Reconnect with your food. Know your farmer. Get your hands dirty and grown your own.
  4. Read labels and understand that food manufacturers actively seek to fool you into thinking their food is healthier than it is. They use hollow language like “natural”, which means nothing. They use five types of sugar so sugar doesn’t have to be listed as the main ingredient. Buyer beware. Vote with your dollars: refuse to buy products that threaten your health.
  5. Buy ingredients, not products with ingredients. Do not be fooled by low-fat, low-calorie, low-sugar claims. These words typically describe “foods” with the least nutrient value. Low fat products usually have more sugar; low calorie foods often are filled with inedible ingredients and low sugar means sugar substitutes, which the body thinks of as poison.

Finally don’t despair. Changing a way of life takes practice and involves repeated missteps as you carefully pick the best stepping-stones. You will slip but the definition of success is falling down seven times and getting up eight times.  Never say diet!

Ritz Crackers are Not Grain: They Aren’t Even Food!

Ritz towerIn a recent news report a woman was fined $10 for not sending a grain in her child’s lunch, even though it had fresh vegetables including potatoes and carrots. The child’s lunch was supplemented with Ritz Crackers, under the pretense of providing the child with a grain.

This story appalls me on many levels.

First why was THIS child’s lunch the focus of persecution? What about the kids with fruit roll-ups, aka, sugar and food colour!?!?

What about the kids with white bread (stripped of its nutrients), slathered in margarine or mayonnaise, (hydrogenated “edible” oils, not food, but edible) and cancer-causing processed meat? That such a sandwich qualifies as food and fits nicely into the food pyramid is ghastly!

What qualifies a Ritz cracker as a grain?

Let’s examine the ingredients in a Ritz cracker.

Wheat Flour, (some labels say “enriched wheat flour”) Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Soybean or Cottonseed), Sugar, Raising Agents (Ammonium and Sodium Bicarbonates, Disodium Diphosphate), Salt, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Soy Lecithin, Barley Malt Flour.

 

The main ingredient is wheat flour. It doesn’t say whole wheat so it means they’ve taken the whole grain, removed all

the nutritious parts and the fibre and left the starch. The law states they must replace some of the nutrients, namely niacin, iron, thiamin, riboflavin, folic acid. Sounds good until you realize that they add synthetic substances, and the body doesn’t necessarily use them in the same way as it does naturally occurring vitamins and minerals.

Grains in their whole state have fewer nutrients, pound for pound, than almost any whole food. Sure they have calories, but few of us have difficulties getting enough calories.

Our bodies need micronutrients like minerals and vitamins; we need fibre and proteins and healthy fats. Grains are not the best sources of any of these nutrients.

The next ingredient is vegetable oil (on some labels), soybean oil and cottonseed oils (on other labels). Soybean and cottonseed oils are most likely genetically modified, as 90% of North A

merican fields of these crops are GMO. GMOs have not been proven safe for human consumption and have been associated with severe environmental issues, including an increase in chemical usage, the creation of super weeds and super insects resistant to pesticides, destruction of soil ecology, and loss of biodiversity.

Ritz crackers info

In addition, the oil in a Ritz has been hydrogenated (adding hydrogen to convert liquid to solid) to give the food the right texture and mouth-feel and a significantly longer shelf life. Hydrogenation converts oil into a poison, as our bodies don’t know what to do with the resulting strange substance: trans fats.

Sugar is the next ingredient. Sugar is another poison in our food supply, contributing to over a hundred conditions and diseases. If it comes from sugar beet (as opposed to sugar cane) it is likely GMO and again, not proven safe for human consumption.

Then there’s baking powder and salt, and then more sugar, in the form of high fructose corn syrup, a sugar known to contribute to obesity and food addictions and usually GMO too. Food manufacturers often use several types of sugar so that they can list them separately and keep sugar from showing up first on all the labels. It’s a trick to keep us from realizing we are overdoing sugar.

About the only food value in a Ritz cracker is in the calories, which have been stripped of what little nutrients were in the grain and combined with unhealthy fat, sugar and salt.

What is really scary is that according to government-sponsored surveys, Ritz Crackers are the #1 perceived snack food in America.

If Ritz crackers are a staple in your diet, I suspect your body is starving. In North America we consume copious amounts of food but we are always hungry.

It’s because real food is so much more than calories or carbs, fat and protein. Real food is about the micronutrients that we can’t get from a processed food product like Ritz crackers.

After examining the evidence, what do you think?

Is a Ritz cracker a grain?

Is it even food?

Does it belong in your kid’s lunch?

My philosophy: Eat the Food, the Whole Food and Nothing but the Food.

Resources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/19/ritz-crackers-fine_n_4303073.html

http://www.snackworks.ca/en/products/Ritz.aspx

Change Your Oil Revised July 2013

oilchangeMany people think “healthy fats” is an oxymoron largely because fat was demonized in the eighties by many health professionals. Food manufacturers were quick to recognize opportunities to make huge profits and “low-fat” foods were created. The vilification of dietary fat is now suspected of contributing to the obesity epidemic partially because food manufacturers replaced fat with sugar, which comes with its own issues.

Furthermore, saturated fats were once believed to cause heart disease, thanks to a faulty study by Dr. Ancel Keyes, which was adopted by most health professionals as the word of dietary law.  This motivated health conscious people to switch to vegetable oils. Now there is evidence that switching from saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats, common in processed vegetable oils, has contributed to higher rates of cancer.

 

One reason is that polyunsaturated oils are highly unstable and vulnerable to oxidation and turning rancid.  Oxidation causes cancer. Oils that are rancid are highly toxic to humans (and pets. Sadly, most pet food is made using rancid fats).

 

To add to the danger, conventionally produced vegetable oils are processed using toxic chemicals like hexane, heptane, caustic soda, and other chemicals, the safety of which is unproven, to mask the rancid smell of processed oils.

In addition to the dangers of oxidation and rancidity, there are also concerns about the omega-6 content of polyunsaturated oils. A recent San Francisco study demonstrated that under laboratory conditions, omega-6 fatty acids could accelerate the growth of prostate tumor cells.  They are also suspected of contributing to breast cancer in post-menopausal women.

 

Other studies show that improving the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio can lower the risk of certain cancers. Specific recommendations vary, but most experts suggest a ratio of between 1:1 and 1:4 at most. The average modern diet has an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 1:20 or more!

 

The rapid increase of vegetable oils in our diets during the past century is largely responsible for this imbalance. While some vegetable oils do contain small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, for the most part, they consist of omega-6. Some experts recommend increasing omega-3 consumption, but it is more effective to reduce omega-6 intake, by eliminating or drastically decreasing polyunsaturated oil consumption, including canola, soy, corn, and sunflower oils.

 

Further compounding the unhealthy fat issue is the hydrogenation of vegetable oils.  Hydrogenated oils and any foods made with them are the leading cause of heart disease and a major contributor to neurological disorders. Simply put, hydrogenated oils (or trans fats) are poison in the human body. They accelerate the buildup of plaque in the arteries and are suspected of causing cancer.

Food producers create hydrogenated oils for the convenience of food producers, primarily so that those foods taste good and can sit on the shelf for months without going bad. Therefore they significantly contribute to profits.

High-fat, low-fat, saturated fat, hydrogenated fats, polyunsaturated fats, omega 3, omega 6; it’s all very confusing. So what are we supposed to do?

 

First we need to recognize that healthy fats are an integral part of a complete diet. Avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease. Your brain is made of fat and it needs saturated fat. Even brain-friendly omega-3 fatty acids can’t be utilized without ample saturated fat. In addition, saturated fat facilitates nerve signals and hormone production. All of these systems rely on saturated fat to function, and to keep you healthy and ultimately, alive.

 

A diet rich in saturated fats protects your heart. Saturated fat reduces Lp(a), which is associated with increased risk for heart disease, and contributes to higher levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, which keep your heart healthy. In traditional cultures saturated fat was revered and even coveted as a source of vital energy.

Many nutrients are fat-soluble and failure to include healthy fats in meals results in many of the nutrients consumed not being absorbed by the body. Beta carotene, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E are three nutrients that require fat in order to be absorbed and used by the human body.  We need saturated fat to transport calcium to our bones, which is why dairy products naturally contain both calcium and saturated fat. Calcium supplements don’t do much good if saturated fat is lacking in our diet. By consuming fats with nutritional supplements, the effectiveness of the phytonutrients in supplements multiplies.

It doesn’t take much fat to aid the absorption of important vitamins and nutrients. Eating just five or ten nuts, or one-fourth of an avocado, provides plenty of dietary fat for transporting nutrients and aiding their absorption.

Saturated fats also boost our immune systems because they contain specialized fatty acids, which are naturally antifungal, antimicrobial and antiviral. These important fatty acids include lauric acid, myristic acid and caprylic acid. A diet rich in these beneficial fats provides the body with essential building blocks to fight pathogenic substances.

 

It is vitally important to choose the right kind of fats for your diet and the right amount because fats are high in calories. Healthy fats include real butter, (ideally from grass-fed cows), virgin (meaning cold-pressed) coconut oil, extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed oil, hemp-seed oil and other fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, and avocados. These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Oils from fatty fish like wild salmon are also beneficial. Even the fat in beef can be called healthy if eaten in moderation and if those animals were grass-fed, not grain-fed.

It is advisable to give up cheap fats such as low-cost vegetable oils. To do so requires the abandonment of most processed foods as they are almost always made with cheap, usually hydrogenated, vegetable oils. Say good-bye to crackers, deep-fried foods, baked goods, indeed, the entire snack aisle of your local grocery store.

Healthy fats are more expensive than unhealthy fats but this is one case where spending extra money significantly protects your health.

Finally, use oils appropriately. For example, extra-virgin olive oil is ideal for salad dressings and dishes that will simmer because it has a low flash point (or temperature at which it begins to burn). Flax oil should never be heated. Butter, coconut oil and peanut oil can stand higher temperatures and are more appropriate for cooking at high temperatures. Ideally, it is best to give up fried foods, because all fried fats contain trans fatty acids.

Sadly most people are more careful about the condition of the oil in the engines of their cars than about the oils they consume to fuel their bodies.  Changing your oil is an integral part of maintaining good health.

Sources for this article include: www.NaturalNews.com, www.Wikipedia.com, www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com, www.alive.com