No fake fat on the Paleo diet
Maybe the “myth” that fake fats don’t make you fat is busted, but the myth that we need a fake fat at all persists. But you don’t need fake fat on the Paleo diet.
In a new study released today by Purdue University, researchers found that rats who were fed Olean-containing potato chips as part of a high-fat diet ate more overall and gained more weight than those who were fed a high fat diet and regular, full-fat potato chips.
This counter-intuitive finding shakes the conventional wisdom that substituting lower calorie, lower fat foods for the full-fat versions will help reduce overall caloric intake and encourage weight loss.
Butter, the better fat
First there is the myth that eating fat makes you fat. This is the premise behind the existence of Olean® or Olestra® to begin with. The truth is that fat, the right kind of fats, do not make you fat. In fact they will help you lose weight and improve your health, all at the same time. When the original research (now disproven) came out, that saurated fats cause heart disease, the food industry looked for replacements for those fats. First there was margarine, the original artery blocking, heart killing, disease causing fat substitute. When it was discovered how bad margarine really was, the industry found another substitute, this time Olestra®.
“Fat substitutes can interfere with the body’s ability to regulate what it eats, and that can result in overeating,” said Susan Swithers, lead author and psychology professor at Purdue University.
But overeating may not be the only reason why fat substitutes make you pack on the pounds. Researchers suspect that fake fats actually mess with our body’s ability to digest and metabolize food, making us more likely to retain weight from what we eat. Read the rest of the article here…
Now it turns out that eating fake fats like Olestra® is making our bodies unable to regulate what we eat, causing us to eat more food and worse, it may actually disrupt our ability to digest and metabolize food. Until now, the worst I had heard about Olestra® was that it causes nasty cases of diarrhea. I am extremely leery of eating anything that was created in a laboratory. Dangerous laboratory food additives have been created, many of which are still being used today. Additives like monosodium glutamate, aspartame, BHA and BHT, various food dyes have been shown to cause cancer, heart disease, brain tumors and more. Why does anyone need to take the risk of eating a possibly dangerous additive when real foods are available, healthy and safe?
Natural, safe, healthy fats like coconut oil and butter are self limiting. You cannot eat too much of these fats since nausea will occur. This alone helps you eat less. In fact eating fats like coconut oil on a regular basis will help you lose weight since you are satisfied for longer periods and therefore eat less food. For me this is probably one of the best features of the Paleo diet. Why allow fake fats into your diet at all? There are no fake fats on the Paleo diet.
