It’s great to see articles like this that reinforce how a healthy body/mind automatically balances calories in and calories out…and how food quality is key to keeping the brain balancing us out automatically.

“Responsibility for monitoring calorie input and energy output falls to the brain. And the job is not easy, says endocrinologist Michael Schwartz, director of the University of Washington’s Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence in Seattle.

To maintain a constant weight, a 160-pound man would need to consume “about 1 million calories over the course of a year,” Schwartz explains — “and expend almost exactly that same million calories.” Only by integrating hosts of chemical signals day and night can the brain manage this energy-budgeting feat, which it has done quite well for most people throughout most of history.
…
Together, these findings suggest that the brain, a longtime master at tracking caloric intake, can be fooled. And when that happens, Swithers observes, weight management suddenly becomes challenging. “Now we have to start counting calories, reading food labels and tracking how many steps we took today,” she says.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/345277/title/Tricks_Foods_Play

 

“[Governmental] dietary guidelines necessarily are political compromises between what science tells us about nutrition and health and what is good for the food industry.” – M. Nestle, New York University

As our knowledge of the human body becomes ever more exact, scientists have made remarkable leaps forward in many fields. We have completed the study of the human genome. We can combat horrible diseases such as childhood leukemia with terrific success rates. Yet for one question that many of us would like answered—what foods boost health and help burn fat long-term?—we find all sorts of confusing claims. Since we know so much about how our body works, can’t science tell us the answer?

As it turns out, science already has, and it is surprisingly simple:

1. Eat a lot of water, fiber, and protein rich (SANE) foods slowly
2. Do a little safe, low-impact, and forceful (eccentric) exercise slowly
3. Drink so much water (and green tea) that your urine is clear, you are never thirsty, and you are too “full” to drink sweetened beverages (soda, etc.)

The scientifically proven facts of fat loss are intuitive and simple. The confusion comes from bureaucrats acting like biologists and marketers imitating MDs.

Let’s clear up this unnecessary confusion by looking at the history of eating using a scale of one day. Say 12:00am last night was the dawn of our first ancestors, and right now it’s one second before midnight. For 23 hours and 57 minutes (up until 11:57pm) our ancestors stayed healthy and fit, eating vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, and seeds. At 11:57pm, people started farming, became “civilized,” and began eating starch and a small amount of sweets. Two seconds ago, people started eating processed starches and sweets. Only right now—one second before midnight—did people start getting most of their calories from manufactured starch- and sweetener-based food products. That means the diet recommended by the government’s Dietary Guidelines was not possiblefor 99.8% of our history.

It is an unarguable anthropological fact that for the vast majority of their existence, our ancestors did not consume much starch and did not consume any added sweeteners. They did not eat whole grains. They ate no grains. They did not cut back on added sweeteners. They did not know what added sweeteners are. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us:

“During the late Paleolithic [the vast majority of human history], the great majority of carbohydrates was derived from vegetables and fruit, very little from cereal grains and none from refined flours.”

This idea is interesting to think about when it comes to our health. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease are called “diseases of civilization.” They did not become issues until agriculture enabled production of starches and sweets about 12,000 years ago. And they did not reach epidemic status until starches and sweets made up 43% of our diet.

Some people might object: “Back then, people did not live as long as we do now.” That is an excellent point. I felt the same way until I read research revealing three facts about our hunter-gatherer ancestors:

 

• Fact: They are few and far between today, but hunter-gatherer tribes are still around, and scientists have studied them intensively. The studies show that they are free from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease.

• Fact: While their average age of death is lower than ours, many ancient hunter-gatherers lived beyond the age of sixty. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us: “Occasionally one hears the claim that primitive people all died too young to get degenerative diseases. This claim is simply false—many lived well into and through the age of vulnerability for such disorders, yet didn’t get them.”

• Fact: Let’s take old age out of the equation entirely. Obese and type 2 diabetic “civilized” children are running around all over the place. The children of hunter-gatherers were obesity and diabetes free.

 

The lowering in the quality of our diet and the lowering in the quality of our health are not coincidences. Could it be possible that we are not designed to digest the food that makes up the majority of our diet?

The Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health states unequivocally: “The USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground…[and] has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe…. At best, [it] offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice.” Here’s what the Journal of the American College of Cardiovascular Exerciselogy has to say: “The low-fat-high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated [publicized] vigorously by the…food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity…diabetes, and metabolic syndromes.” The Co-Founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest chimes in: “Good advice about nutrition conflicts with the interests of many big industries, each of which has more lobbying power than all the public-interest groups combined.”

We are not getting bigger and sicker because we are eating a lot of food. We are becoming hormonally “clogged” and losing our natural ability to burn fat from eating the wrong quality of food. The further the quality of our calories has gotten from the high-quality SANE food we ate for 99.8% of our evolutionary history, the bigger and sicker we have become.

 

 

Decades of advanced dietary research have taken place alongside spiking obesity and disease rates. This research recommends a diet much different than any version of the government’s Dietary Guidelines. For example, Dr. Marion Nestle at New York University notes how the scientific community has long criticized the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid’s failure to “recognize the biochemical equivalency of sugars and starches in the body.” More simply, starch has the same impact on our body as sugar. Why don’t the government’s guidelines reflect this research? Who needs science when a constant barrage of food, fitness, and pharmaceutical industry marketing bullies us into believing that the government’s recommendations are healthy?

“The USDA-sponsored Dietary Guidelines for Americans and its Food Guide Pyramid are nutritionally and biochemically unsound…They radically changed the food habits of tens of millions of Americans in a massive human experiment that has gone awry…. Today, there is little doubt that there is a clear temporal association between the ‘heart healthy’ diet and the current, growing epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type-2 diabetes.” – A. Ottoboni, in the Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons

A great deal of money is being made from our nutritional confusion. Even worse, the government created these guidelines in much the same way it creates laws: by listening to lobbyists and by making compromises. The history of the USDA guidelines and graphics is nothing short of shocking. We’ll dig into the details starting in the next post.

 

“Although low-fat high-carbohydrate diets are recommended…in an effort to reduce the risk of coronary artery disease, the results of short-term studies have shown that these diets can lead to…an increased risk of coronary artery disease.” – The American Diabetes Association

As with other popular misconceptions about how our bodies work, confusion runs rampant about lowering cholesterol and cholesterol in general. Ancel Keys played a key role in creating this problem. Along with his other claims, he needed a scientific sounding explanation for how foods containing fat kill us. Looking at his data, Keys noticed that people eating more foods that contain fat generally had higher total cholesterol. While there was—and still is—no proof that high total cholesterol causes cardiovascular issues, Keys called it the cause of their heart problems.

It’s Not About Lower Total Cholesterol Levels

Even while Keys was touting his new findings, the Federal Register (the official log of the federal government of the U.S.) was on record with the true scientific data at that time:

“The role of cholesterol in heart disease has not been established. A causal relationship between blood cholesterol levels and these diseases has not been proved. The advisability of making extensive changes in the nature of the dietary fat intake of the people of this country has not been demonstrated.”

Likewise, to this day, no studies have proven high total cholesterol causes heart disease. In the American Journal of Medicine T. Gordon reported, “Total cholesterol per se is not a risk factor for coronary heart disease at all.” Dr. Uffe Ravnskov analyzed 26 randomized and controlled trials which were designed to lower total cholesterol and, theoretically, the risk of cardiovascular disease and death. Ravnskov’s analysis put people into two groups:

1. Treatment Group: People who ate less food that contain fat and/or took cholesterol-lowering drugs.
2. Control Group: People who did not eat less food that contain fat and did not take cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Across the studies, the total number of heart attack deaths was equal between the groups, and more people died overall in the group who ate less fat and/or took cholesterol-lowering drugs. Ravnskov concluded: “Lowering serum cholesterol concentrations does not reduce mortality and is unlikelyto prevent coronary heart disease.”

Average Outcomes Across the 26 Cholesterol Studies

Cholesterol Myths

For foods that contain fat and cholesterol to be killers, three points must be proven:

1. Eating natural foods that contain fat leads to risky levels of cholesterol.
2. These levels of cholesterol cause cardiovascular disease.
3. The diet outlined by government’s guidelines improves these cholesterol levels.

None of these things have been proven.

University of California’s J.B. German summarizes the state of cholesterol research:

“The approach of many mainstream investigators…has been narrowly focused to produce and evaluate evidence in support of the hypothesis that dietary saturated fat elevates LDL cholesterol and thus the risk of coronary artery disease. The evidence is not strong, and, overall, dietary intervention by lowering saturated fat intake does not lower the incidence of nonfatal coronary artery disease; nor does such dietary intervention lower coronary disease or total mortality.”

Eating SANE foods containing fat has never been proven to lead to risky levels of cholesterol. The effect of natural dietary fat on cholesterol has never been proven to cause cardiovascular disease. In fact, studies have shown the opposite. The high-starch, low-fat, and low-protein diet promoted by the government’s guidelines has been proven to worsen the type of cholesterol that decreases the risk of heart disease (HDL cholesterol).

We’ll cover why there is so much confusion about cholesterol in the next post.