There are five questions to ask when making food choices:
If you can answer “yes” to all of these, you are good to go.
Cholesterol and animal fat are actually protective against strokes. That’s why Japan has such a high stroke rate. They don’t eat as much animal fat as we do. But they do eat a fair amount of rice, and that can cause damage from the carbohydrates. After the second world war, the Japanese were influenced to eat more like us with more meat and dairy. Their stroke rate went down by 85%.
One of these Japanese studies showed that the benefit came from the animal fat and cholesterol consumed. Those with the highest intake had the lowest incidence of stroke. Animal protein was not significant—just the fat and cholesterol.
The Okinawans, the Japanese people with the longer lifespans, eat more meat and less rice than other Japanese people, and they’re healthier for it.
References:
Barry Groves. Trick And Treat – how ‘healthy eating’ is making us ill. 2008.
Barry Groves. The Dangers of Low Blood Cholesterol, Second Opinions.
Shimamoto T, et al. Trends for Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke and Their Risk Factors in Japan. Circulation. 1989; 3: 503-15.
Adachi H, Hino A. Trends in nutritional intake and serum cholesterol levels over 40 years in Tanushimaru, Japanese men. J Epidemiol 2005; 15:85-89.
Liu L, et al. Changes in stroke mortality rates for 1950 to 1997. A great slowdown of decline trend in Japan. Stroke 2001; 32:1745.
Iso H, et al. Trends of cardiovascular risk factors and diseases in Japan: implications for primordial prevention. Prev Med 1999; 29: S102-S105.
Sauvaget C, et al. Animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol intakes and risk of cerebral infarction mortality in the Adult Health Study. Stroke 2004; 35: 1351.
Gillman MW, et al. Inverse association of dietary fat with development of ischemic stroke in men. JAMA 1997; 278: 2145-2150.
Atkins D, et al. Cholesterol reduction and the risk of stroke in men. A meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials. Ann Int Med 1993; 119: 136-145.
Dyker AG, et al. Influence of cholesterol on survival after stroke: retrospective study. BMJ 1997; 314: 1584.
It’s important to do the best we can with the plan we’ve invested in. That’s certainly my goal. My big issue with the NutriSystem plan is making sure that my cholesterol level doesn’t tank, and I’m not entirely sure how to do that or even if it can be done. One of my lowest cholesterol readings ever was 125. This was measured following a round of NutriSystem back around 1990, and this also happened to be when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was suffering with major depression at the time. Somehow, I still managed to function. It’s critical that I don’t let my cholesterol get that low again this time because low cholesterol is a risk factor, and I’ve already seen that my mood dips with my cholesterol readings. My cholesterol readings went down when I was vegan, and I was also beginning to develop depression, so there’s a hint. My intake was very high in fiber while I was vegan, and I know that can lower cholesterol. My guess for this round is that I need to lean my intake toward more fat while, of course, staying in calorie range. I will have blood tests done to make sure that my cholesterol levels stay where they need to be. My mood is good at present at least, so that’s a good sign.
Given the unexpected challenges I have had with my own health, I would advise anyone contemplating making a major dietary change to do so with the assistance of their physician, no matter what your age or how good you think your health is. At minimum, get a lipid panel done before the change and again a month or two into it.
Dietary fats are not all the same. Some can be harmful while others are quite healthy. Some contribute to inflammation, some ease it. Omega-3 in particular is noted for its anti-inflammatory properties. I definitely would NOT recommend vegetable oil such as from soy or corn. It contains too much omega-6 fat, which causes inflammation. That type of fat will also suppress your immune system and contribute to cancer. I don’t tend to eat much of those at all, unless I’m eating in a restaurant that prepares the food with vegetable oils. I don’t use them at home. Animal fat from pasture-raised meat and dairy, olive oil, and coconut oil don’t contain much omega-6, so they should all be fine. In fact, these kinds of oils can help the immune system and protect against cancer. The type of fats you choose will make a difference in weight as well. Pig farmers tried using coconut oil to fatten their pigs. It didn’t work. The pigs stayed lean. Then they switched to vegetable oil, and the pigs got fat.
There was an interesting dietary study done in 1931. They conducted a controlled dietary trial using a large variety of diets, ranging from 800 to 2,700 calories. Before they did that, they put all patients on a 1,000 calorie diet of varying types. Here are the stats for the average daily losses for the 1,000 calorie diets:
High-carbohydrate/low-fat – 49 grams
High-carbohydrate/low-protein – 122 grams
Low-carbohydrate/high-protein – 183 grams
Low-carbohydrate/high-fat – 205 grams
In other words, the patients on the low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet lost 4 times what those on the high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet lost. In another commentary on this diet, Barry Groves said that some patients actually gained weight on the high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet.
It was expected that on the 1,700 and 2,700 calorie diets, patients would not lose weight. In fact, all but three did lose weight.
In their conclusion, Lyon and Dunlop said: “The most striking feature … is that the losses appear to be inversely proportionate to the carbohydrate content of the food. Where the carbohydrate intake is low the rate of loss in weight is greater and conversely.”
Barry Groves says in Trick and Treat that the high-fat diet is preferable over the high-protein diet because excess protein creates waste products that stress the organs such as the kidneys. Fat burns cleaner in the body.
References:
Lyon DM, Dunlop DM. The treatment of obesity: a comparison of the effects of diet and of thyroid extract. Quart J Med 1932; 1: 331.
Barry Groves. Trick And Treat – how ‘healthy eating’ is making us ill
Barry Groves’ site: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/
At some point in the weight loss process, you’ve got to move into maintenance mode. Dieting would become a problem if you did not stop and became underweight. If your significant other thinks you’re thin enough now, I would definitely take that into consideration. After all, doesn’t what they find desirable count for something? Also, most people tend to be most critical of themselves. What you see in the mirror may not be what others are seeing. This is one of the ways that anorexics go astray. They see fat in the mirror when in truth they look skeletal. Such perception actually has a name: body dysmorphic disorder. If others are telling you that you’re thin enough already and you’ve got a healthy BMI, consider that maybe they’re right. There’s an article available for calculating ideal weight, if you’d like to check it out. It’s here. The last method is a military method that takes into consideration one’s body measurements.
I’m looking forward to taking a low-carb high-fat break today. I think it’s going to be good for my mental health, literally. Here’s some background on what I mean by that. I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Treatment is working well, so my mood has been even. Bipolar disorder, including my case, is often treated with medications originally developed to treat epileptics. Epileptics are often treated with a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet is a low-carb high-fat diet. The ketogenic diet used to treat epileptics resembles the induction phase of the Atkins diet in that it is recommended that patients consume 20g or less of carbohydrates. The resulting diet can get as much as 90% of its calories from fat. There is some conjecture in scientific circles that since a ketogenic diet works for epileptics, it just might work for those with bipolar disorder, too, since the medication is often the same. Tests in rats have shown promise, but the theory has not yet been formally tested in humans. I have tried a ketogenic diet before and felt quite good on it. Since a ketogenic diet works well for weight loss, too, this should not hinder me that way.
References:
El-Mallakh RS, Paskitti ME. The ketogenic diet may have mood-stabilizing properties. Med Hypotheses. 2001 Dec;57(6):724-6.
Murphy P, Likhodii S, Nylen K, Burnham WM. The Antidepressant Properties of the Ketogenic Diet. Biol Psychiatry. 2004 Dec 15;56(12):981-3.
I’m reading the chapter in my book, Trick And Treat – how ‘healthy eating’ is making us ill by Barry Groves about why we must be carnivores. Basically, we have small digestive systems and large brains. We are designed for an energy dense diet such as is found in fatty meats. Fossil evidence indicates that our prehistoric ancestors ate very little if any vegetable matter. They analyzed fossil poop to determine that. Vegetarians like to compare us to other primates, but our digestive systems are very different from theirs. Our digestive systems are more like those of carnivorous species.
If you suspect that you may have hypothyroidism, consider eliminating soy. Soy is a potent goitrogen. You can find out more about goitrogens here. Apparently, several fruits and vegetables are also goitrogens when eaten raw. There’s a list of them on the link.
I’ve had problems of a different sort before with soy. In one of my big weight loss efforts, I was on the Medifast diet. Virtually all of the program foods on Medifast are soy. Time of month became much heavier, and I was more irregular. Soy is known to affect hormones. For one, it has phytoestrogens that mimic the estrogens in the body. Feeding a baby soy formula is like giving it five birth control pills a day. To make matters worse, most of the soy in the United States is genetically modified, including the soy used by Medifast. I thought about doing that diet again this time, but I decided that I did not want to expose myself to that much soy. There’s some in the NutriSystem foods, but it doesn’t comprise nearly as much of the diet.