“It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, datato support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.” – American Heart Association

The idea that we have an obesity epidemic because people are not exercising enough is a myth. Saffron A. Whitehead at St. George’s University of London reported: “Most studies show that the obese do about the same physical activity as [the] lean.”

Common sense tells us that if exercising less is the cause of our collective weight issues, we must be collectively exercising less. Are we?

Not even close.

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The idea of aerobic exercise did not even exist in the mainstream until the 1968 publication of the book Aerobics by Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper. Dr. Entin, with the department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University, explains the common view before then: “In the 1930’s and 40’s…high volume endurance training was thought to be bad for the heart. Through the ‘50’s and even ‘60’s, exercise was not thought to be useful…and endurance exercise was thought to be harmful to women.” During that same period the percent of obese Americans was dramatically lower than today. Nowadays, Americans exercise more than anyone else in the world and are the sixth heaviest population in the world. How could doing too little of something that we did even less of before the problem existed cause the problem?

Some people claim that we are getting heavier because we are using labor-saving devices. Yet that doesn’t make sense. The vast majority of labor-saving devices became common in households decades before obesity shot up. Use of dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and all the major labor-saving devices increased most between 1945 and 1965. However, obesity increased little during that time period. Use of these devices increased very little between 1978 and 1998 while obesity rates shot up. So how could labor-saving devices be the cause of weight problems?

Reread the quote from the American Heart Association at the start of this chapter. Digging into the data and abandoning assumptions about our activity levels, researchers like New York University’s Marion Nestle tell us, “…the activity levels of Americans appear to have changed little, if at all, from the 1970s to the 1990s.”

What about all the TV watching? That’s got to be the cause, right? That too does not correspond with the facts.  Tsinghua University professor Seth Roberts determined: “Time spent watching TV increased by 45% from 1965 to 1975, yet obesity increased little over that time; from 1975 to 1995, when obesity shot up, TV watching increased only a little.”

Eating lower–quality food creates the clog that causes chronic weight gain. People can be plenty active, and exercise for hours, but if they eat low-quality food, they will get clogged and gain body fat. Long-term weight gain is determined by food and exercise quality, not quantity.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

“There is a wealth of…evidence that increasing the concentration of HDL cholesterol through diet will lower the risk of coronary artery disease.” –R.P. Mensink, Maastricht University

In the last post we showed how Eating Fat Does Not Hurt Cholesterol & It’s Not About Lowering Cholesterol Anyway. Here’s where the confusion about cholesterol comes from in the first place. There are different types of cholesterol, and most of them are helpful or neutral. The two most commonly discussed are LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and HDL (high-density lipoprotein). They are required to produce new cells and hormones. Because of this critical role, even if we never ate any cholesterol, our liver or intestines would produce it.

What Are Healthy Cholesterol Numbers?

When it comes to predicting heart health, the American Heart Association, International Diabetes Federation, and World Health Organization agree that low HDL cholesterol—not high LDL cholesterol—is what matters. And that low HDL is bad. Looking at disease and death rates at various levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, researchers have found that people with low HDL run a much greater risk of heart disease.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

Relative Risk of Heart Disease Given Total Cholesterol

(Total Cholesterol in Parenthesis)

There are two things to note about this graphic. First, total cholesterol is irrelevant. If someone tells you their total cholesterol is 185, what is their risk of heart disease? Looking at the preceding table, it is either very low or high, depending on how much of that 185 consists of HDL cholesterol. Similarly, if someone tells you their total cholesterol is 245, they either have a herculean heart or a hemorrhaging heart, depending on their HDL levels.

Second, note how increasing HDL cholesterol is more important for heart health than decreasing LDL cholesterol. High HDL cholesterol protects us from heart problems more than dropping our LDL levels ever could. Heart-healthy diets are not about lowering total cholesterol. They are about raising HDL cholesterol.

“…low HDL-cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk…[programs] resulting in an increase in HDL-cholesterol levels could decrease the incidence of ischemic heart disease.” – J.P. Despres, Laval University

How to Raise HDL Cholesterol

The most effective way to raise our HDL levels is to eat more natural fat and less unnatural starch. Fat raises HDL. Starch lowers HDL.

The Impact of Fat and Starch on HDL and LDL Cholesterol and Health

A Smarter Science of Heart Healthy Foods

Since lower HDL does more harm than lower LDL does good, any diet which tells us to replace SANE sources of fat with inSANE starch worsens our cholesterol. This is why D. Mozaffarian at Harvard University wrote: “[Focusing] on effects of total and saturated fat on…total and low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol may have failed to reduce coronary heart disease risk and inadvertently worsened…insulin resistance, and weight gain.” Researcher A. Garg wrote the following in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “High-carbohydrate diets…caused persistent deterioration of glycemic control and accentuation of hyperinsulinemia [caused clogs], as well as increased…very-low-density lipoprotein [bad] cholesterol levels.”

Regrettably, under the government’s guidelines, we are supposed to replace natural foods containing fat with low-fat-high-starch products to lower our total cholesterol. Why? Lower total cholesterol is meaningless, and lower HDL cholesterol is terrible for us. Researchers have demonstrated this for decades.

For example, the February 1989 issue of the Diabetes Care journal put out by the American Diabetes Association contained a study comparing the government’s diet with a more SANE way of eating. The study concluded: “VLDL [bad] cholesterol was significantly increased…High-density lipoprotein [good] cholesterol concentrations were significantly decreased after consumption of the 60% carbohydrate diet.”

Comparable results were found with the equally imbalanced U.K. dietary guidelines. In the words of University of Glasgow researcher S.R. Arefhosseini: “Following the U.K. dietary guidelines resulted in changes…more likely to favor an increased risk of coronary heart disease.”

What About Saturated Fat and Cholesterol?

Even saturated fats are not cholesterol criminals. The American Heart Association found:

“No adequately designed randomized controlled study in the general population has shown that…decreasing saturated fat…intake significantly decreases coronary heart disease mortality.”

Bottom Line: Ways to Improve Cholesterol

What is the bottom line? Studies show that any diet telling you to replace SANE sources of fat with inSANE starches is unhealthy and fattening. M.L. McCullough at Harvard University made this point: “Limiting unsaturated fats, which is usually done by increasing carbohydrates…is detrimental…. Low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets provide a higher glycemic load, aggravate hyperinsulinemia [clogging], and may thus increase the risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease.”

Want to improve your cholesterol naturally? Eat more, but smarter.

Sadly, the government’s diet tells us to do exactly what science says we should avoid.

If you think this is troubling, wait until you see what happened when big business jumped on the government bandwagon. We’ll cover that next week.

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“Insulin has profound metabolic effects in the determination of body weight…” – B. Dokken, University of Arizona

The critical effect hormones have on body fat has been well known in scientific circles for a long time. Especially the hormone insulin. Three quick examples:

• A study in the journal Diabetic Medicine found that giving patients the hormone insulin “is associated with weight gain,” specifically, “an increase in trunk [belly] fat mass.
• The journal Diabetes and Metabolism reports: “Most studies report an average 13.2 lb. weight gain during the first year following the initiation of insulin therapy.” The journal went on to conclude that when it comes to taking shots of the hormone insulin “weight gain seems mandatory.”
• In the journal Diabetes an aptly title study “Intensive Insulin Therapy and Weight Gain in IDDM (type 1 diabetes)” revealed that after only two months, “Body weight increased ~6 lbs. with intensive insulin therapy as a result of an increase in fat mass.”

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

Note that there’s no mention of “eating too much” or “exercising too little.” That’s because calories aren’t all that matter. Hormones matter a lot. Hundreds of millions of diabetics have proven this for years. And that’s why long-term fat loss and robust health isn’t about eating less of a hormonally-poor traditional diet and doing more hormonally-irrelevant traditional exercise. These techniques may mask our hormonal breakdown, but they do not fix it.

Long-term fat loss and robust health isn’t about eating less of a hormonally-poor traditional diet and doing more hormonally-irrelevant traditional exercise.

Forget counting calories. Focus on eating more hormonally-helpful SANE foods, and doing less, but hormonally-helpful eccentric exercise. Eat more and exercising less–smarter. Sure that seems like the opposite of what we’ve been told to do, but isn’t it about time to get the opposite of what we’ve gotten?

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

Recently recorded a wonderful bonus podcast with the lovely Carole Carson (http://www.fromfat2fit.com) who asked for my two cents on the recent debate about calling obesity a disease. Given the timeliness of this, wanted to share the clip now, and be sure to stay tuned for the delightful entire show with Carole in the coming months.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

ObesityADisease

“The crucial factor is not how much is eaten…or how much is expended, but how…those calories are utilized and made available when needed.” – Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories

A calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how likely it is to be stored as body fat. We can think about human biology like this: When we eat, a traffic cop tells calories where to go. How Aggressively calories approach this traffic cop determines their chances of being stored as body fat.

The traffic cop directs calories to repair, fuel, or fatten us—in that order. It first makes sure we have enough fuel to rebuild anything that has broken down. Next, it keeps us doing whatever we are doing. Last, it seeks to protect us from starving. As long as we have a calm and consistent flow of calories coming into our system, the cop does a great job directing them.

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However, when calories approach the traffic cop Aggressively, it gets angry, throws its clipboard down, and sends those calories to fat cells. Our body is fine with a lot of food. It is Aggressive food that aggravates it. Five hundred calm calories creeping into the bloodstream over many hours are less likely to be stored as body fat than five hundred Aggressive calories rushing in all at once. Like the rest of us, our body does not do its best work when dealing with a bunch of Aggressive requests all at once.

To best understand calories’ Aggression we first need to understand how our body fuels itself. It does not run on the food we eat. It runs primarily on glucose, a sugar our body creates from the food we eat. That may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it is not.

Storing body fat is not caused by eating a lot of food. Storing body fat is about a response to eating food that causes us to have more glucose in our bloodstream than we can use at one time. That is why calories’ Aggression matters so much. The more Aggressive calories are, the faster they increase the levels of glucose in our bloodstream. The faster calories increase our glucose levels, the more likely we are to have more glucose than the body can deal with at one time. That’s when it shuttles the excess into our fat cells.

The distinction between “a lot of food” and “a lot of glucose right now” is important. We can eat all the food we want and never gain body fat if the glucose the food generates does not exceed the glucose level we can deal with right then. Fortunately, SANE foods prevent excess glucose from getting into our bloodstream. If we simply focus on increasing the amount of water-, fiber-, and protein-packed high-Satiety foods we are eating, we will automatically avoid Aggressive calories and store less body fat.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES