Fat! Friend or Foe? Part 2
By Ally Foreman
If you’re confused about all the apparently conflicting advice about fat in your diet, read this fab series of articles by our very own Ally Forman that will help get it all into perspective.
Part 2 – A change to Low fat high carbs
Key date 2 – 1977…
…the US government published the “Dietary Goals for the United States” (based on Keys flawed study). These dietary guidelines advocated a diet low in fat and high in carbohydrates, which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what we have eaten for the rest of our human existence.
To put this in perspective, if human existence were 1 day, we have been eating cereals and grains for 5minutes and sugar for 5 seconds. So should we really be surprised that globally, whilst we live longer due to better standards of living and medical advances, our state of health and disease is largely in decline and we are a medicated society.
Our bodies are not used to the influx of cereals, sugars and processed food, which have become the main dietary cornerstone of almost all developed countries.
The USDA Food Pyramid of 1992 advocated 7-11 portions of grains, such as bread, rice, pasta and cereal each day. The majority of these were refined and processed so not only did we ingest an excess of carbohydrate, but also any nutrients we may have got were largely removed by bleaching and stripping down the original grain.
Then the further addition of preservatives and other toxic chemicals to increase shelf life and add synthetic vitamins has further diminished any nutritional value. Fat and sugar was banished to the top of the pyramid to be consumed in limited amounts only.
Whilst sugar rightly belongs there, healthy fats do not. In fact, most people would benefit from a diet of 50-70% of their daily calories from healful fats, which is the exact opposite of the Food Pyramid.
The 2011 revision to The Healthy Food Plate has downplayed the amount of grains, concentrating rightly on vegetables making up half the plate, however fat is still virtually missing, excepting a small portion of fat free or reduced fat dairy.
