“You’re going to die of a heart attack.” Have you heard it yet? Most of you reading have been on a strict paleo diet (+/-5points) for over a week now. People at work, or heck-in your household, have probably started looking at you with the hairy eyeball when you pull your meat-rollups out of the fridge, and have tried sneaking cream and sugar into your coffee from across the kitchen just to get you to stop complaining.
I am sure that many of you have also heard something about the amount of meat, egg, or oil that you are ingesting, and how it is BAD FOR YOU, you’re on the fast track to all sorts of health issues. Now, let me start off with the fact that 99% of said peanut gallery(add this to your blog word bank for naysayers/people unfamiliar with the science behind eating paleo/primal. This is doubly funny when you remember peanuts are a legume. Go ahead and chuckle.) have been raised to believe exactly that. Whole grains are good, and low fat is the free ticket to health and longevity. (Gross, saying that made me nauseous.) Well, peanut gallery…I wonder what your hairy eyeballs will do after getting a look at the information I have for you today. Put your thinking and reading caps on, folks. This gets about as complicated as why we detest grains, so to truly get a good background and begin to form your own understanding of why YOU have decided to embrace F-A-T, you will need to follow up on the sources I provide. (Not those of you who have *correctly* decided to place your trust in a giant, curly headed, LBBS’er. You just skip to the end and keep on, keepin’ on.)
This is your history lesson. (It’s a 2 minute video. Watch it, dangit!) The Standard American Diet (SAD should be in your word bank…) has led most of us to believe that the fat we eat is floating around in our arteries, sticking to the walls and gumming things up. I know how crazy it sounds for me to be telling you that this is totally not true. The things that I want you to read up on and learn more about include these catchy phrases (think late night advertisement for sketchy/random CD collections):
Saturated Fat: it just ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Run like hell from trans or hydrogenated and into the open arms of sat/mono/poly.
Sky-high triglyceride doesn’t rhyme with processed carbs, but it should.
Seriously. That should keep you busy, and get you re-thinking your prior life’s low-fat granola and skim milk breakfasts, for awhile. And in closing, I will leave you with this food for thought from Mary Enig, PhD:
“Today heart disease causes at least 40% of all US deaths. If, as we have been told, heart disease results from the consumption of saturated fats, one would expect to find a corresponding increase in animal fat in the American diet. Actually, the reverse is true. During the sixty-year period from 1910 to 1970, the proportion of traditional animal fat in the American diet declined from 83% to 62%, and butter consumption plummeted from eighteen pounds per person per year to four.
During the past eighty years, dietary cholesterol intake has increased only 1%. During the same period the percentage of dietary vegetable oils in the form of margarine, shortening and refined oils increased about 400% while the consumption of sugar and processed foods increased about 60%.2.” For kicks, check out her three-parter (one, two, three) on saturated fat for some well spelled out info to round out your big FAT experience.
Ciao, Bello…Until Next Time…
(Sooner, I promise. This one was a doosy for me)
Mallory
WESTMINSTER STRENGTH & CONDITIONING
