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Low Fat Versus Low Carb for Weight Loss: 5 Changes to Make

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No one becomes morbidly obese by overdosing on avocados or olive oil, yet fat has been demonized in the weight loss circles since the 90’s.

I won’t go into the whole USDA food guide pyramid mistake in this article, but if you’d like to read why it was such a bad idea you can do this in a previous article which can be read by clicking here.

That being said, this does not mean that you can ignore the higher calorie content found in fats.  Nuts are very good for you (raw, NO added oils) but if you eat two pounds a day there will be a price to pay in weight gain.  Same thing with olive oil.  But this doesn’t mean that you should avoid these foods altogether.  That is throwing out the baby with the bath water (and really….did anyone ACTUALLY ever throw a baby out when dumping the bath??).

This low-fat craze, however, was a huge push over the past 3 decades.  And look where it’s gotten us as a society; more obesity, more diabetes, more heart disease and more cancer.  Part of the problem with the low-fat diets is that we replaced the fats with bad carbohydrates like high fructose corn syrup and enriched wheat flour, two items that are the worst thing you can do for your weight and your health.

You can still see the remnants of the low-fat craze just by looking at the front of food package.  Some products proudly proclaim themselves to be “low fat” and use healthy in the same sentence.  This is despite the fact that a seasoned biochemist couldn’t pronounce half the ingredients on the label.

Leaving “low fat” out of the battle for weight loss, the carb story has been just as confusing.  Carbs became demonized as a group of macronutrients without thought to whether the carbohydrates came from broccoli or Wonder bread.

With all of that being said, keeping your carb intake lower is probably a good idea.  This particular study reinforces that point by comparing a low-fat diet to a low-carb diet.  In it, researchers compared 148 men and women put on either a low-carbohydrate diet (<40 grams per day) or a low-fat diet (<30% of daily energy intake from total fat with less than 7% coming from saturated fat]).  Here’s what they found after a year’s time:

  • The low-carb diet group lost more weight (7.7 pounds more).
  • The low-carb group lost more fat (1.5% more fat loss).
  • The low-carb group had a better improvement in HDL levels, the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL as well as triglyceride levels.

None of these results are Earth-shattering, but it does become clear that paying attention to your carb count has better payouts on health then does focusing on fat content of your diet.  Just to help you along, here are some tips for lowering your carb intake:

  1. Try mashed cauliflower with spices and olive oil instead of potatoes.
  2. Try jicama tortillas instead of corn or four tortillas, or try romaine lettuce to wrap your fish tacos.
  3. Ditch the sodas and juices – try organic teas or get a SodaStream Crystal and make your own sparkling water with essences.
  4. Ditch sauces and use spices instead (spices with no sugars added, of course).
  5. If you’re going for pasta, try to make it a smaller part of the dish rather than the dominant food group.

So what creative ways have you come up with to lower your carb intake?

 

Diabetes & Heart Disease–Are They Separate? 4 Things to Know

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Diabetes and Heart disease.  Sounds like a stupid question, right?  One is the domain of a cardiologist and the other an endocrinologist.

Sure, the two are linked and having diabetes greatly increases your risk of having a heart attack.  To be a little more precise, 65% of diabetics die of heart disease or stroke.  That’s a pretty high number.  What this usually means in mainstream medicine, where specialists manage conditions and not patients, is that any person who is diabetic needs to make sure his or her blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides are under control.  And, by “under control,” we mean that the patient is taking his or her medication like a good little boy or girl.

The term is “comorbidities.”  This is a term used to describe two or more diseases that run alongside one another.  Like diabetes and heart disease.

But what if our view on this was entirely wrong??  What if, in reality, diabetes and heart disease are the same condition, just with different outward expressions?

Let’s boil it down to a common denominator: blood vessel health (although “vascular health” sounds much more trendy).  No one has a heart attack or stroke until he or she has a problem with the blood vessels feeding these organs.  Healthy blood vessels don’t get filled with plaque and throw off blood clots to clog smaller arteries.  And few things are more deadly for your blood vessels than the prediabetic and diabetic conditions.

This is why prediabetes is so incredibly bad for you as well–because your blood vessels are being destroyed in the process.  The links between heart disease and diabetes are already strong and undeniable, but I suggest that they are along the same continuum.  People who die of a heart attack just didn’t live long enough to get diabetes, but you can bet that almost all of them where prediabetic.

This also means that the prevention of these two conditions is the same.  I can’t think of one lifestyle change that would benefit diabetes and not heart disease and vice versa.  Which makes everything easier because you just have to focus on an anti-diabetic lifestyle and you get more bang for your buck.  Contrast this with medical therapy, where diabetes is managed with diabetic medications, but your heart disease risk is managed with blood pressure drugs, statins to lower cholesterol and aspirin or blood thinners to prevent clots from forming.  We still treat the two as separate conditions and manage them independently.

So why the long-winded discussion?  It relates to this particular study linking HbA1c levels and heart disease risk in non-diabetics with no prior history of cardiovascular events.

For those of you not familiar with HbA1c (also referred to as glycosylated hemoglobin, hemoglobin A1c or just plain A1c).  This number on your bloodwork tracks what your blood sugar levels have been doing over an average of about 3 months, using red blood cells (which live about 3 months).  Here’s how the numbers break down:

  • An ideal number is in the low 5’s.
  • Prediabetes is considered between 5.7 and 6.4%
  • Anything over 6.5% is consistent with diabetes.
  • For a medicated diabetic, under 7.0% is good–too much lower may kill you off faster.
  • However, for LIFESTYLE, there is no number too low for a diabetic.

With this in mind, you can understand just how bad the news from this study are.  Keep in mind that all the patients in this study had an HbA1c less than 6.5%:

  1. As HbA1c levels increased, there was an increase in the presence of heart disease and number of blood vessels involved.
  2. Those with higher HbA1c levels had a 280% higher chance of having heart disease.
  3. Those with both higher inflammation (as measured by hsCRP) and HbA1c levels closer to 6.5%, there was a 418% higher risk.
  4. The ideal cut-off value of HbA1c was below 5.6%.

That last bullet point, #4 above, pretty much means that 2/3 of the US alone is well on their way to heart disease.  It’s beyond time to get serious about this.  And getting back to my earlier point, this study basically uses a “diabetic” blood test to determine how much at risk someone is for developing heart disease.  Doesn’t get more closely associated than that.

 

Slow This Down to Slash Diabetes Risk

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Many think that preventing Type 2 diabetes requires a major overhaul on your lifestyle. For many, this IS true, but sometimes some incredibly simple changes can have powerful results.

I have always felt that food is, and should be, a celebration of life.  Think of the events, meetings and dinners that you have gone to in your life.  Many times food is at the center of this experience.  And this isn’t just today–this hedonistic experience has been at the heart of celebrations for as long as we have been keeping records.

But part of that celebration should, arguably, be actually enjoying the food that you are eating.  Let me rephrase this a little more clearly…

Slow down when you eat.

How can you enjoy your food if you’re scarfing it down like the smallest child in a family of 12 at dinner?  Quite frankly, you can’t.

But besides enjoying the experience more, there are distinct health benefits associated with this behavior.  Merely chewing more has been shown to have very positive anti-diabetic properties.  This includes better absorption of healthy fats from a meal, higher levels of GLP-1 in the bloodstream (a very potent anti-diabetic hormone in your body) and greater satiety (the people who chewed more felt more full after eating).

All pretty good things.

But let’s take this out to a lifetime of eating our meals rapidly without enjoying them to their fullest.  This particular study looked at the risk of developing diabetes in slow versus fast eaters.

Here’s what they found:

A pretty startling 252% increased risk of developing diabetes in someone who described themselves as a fast eater.

That’s pretty dramatic for an aspect of diet that few ever consider.

Think on this just before you take a bite of that Big Mac or Egg McMuffin as you are driving on your way to work…

How to Prevent Diabetes, Avoid Heart Disease with a Simple Plan

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Chronic disease is taking too many too soon. On top are 2 particular diseases. A simple approach can show you how to prevent diabetes and avoid heart disease.

Everyone wants to live as long as they can with the greatest health they can.  Longevity is the goal, but without health it may not seem worth it.  Technology has a good way of keeping you alive long after it was your time to go.  That’s not exactly on my wish list for my lifestyle as I age.

So how can we age gracefully and do our best to avoid chronic disease?  The research has consistently pointed to calorie restriction without nutrient restriction to maintain an ideal body weight and stave off disease.  This usually means that your 1200 calories per day comes from broccoli and not from a Big Mac Value Meal.

But not everyone wants to live life in a restricted calorie fashion.  Actually, to be honest, few do.  And society certainly does not support this lifestyle with the near elimination of the “small” size in the fast food industry (really–does it make us feel better to order the “medium” sized value meal?  Do we somehow feel cheated if we were to only buy a “small” value meal??).

Luckily, there has been research looking at how effective modifications to the calorie restricted lifestyle are.  One of the ones that seems to rise to the top is alternate day calorie restriction.  The name describes it well, but basically you would restricted your calories to about 50% of normal every other day.  During the non-restricted days there are no calorie restrictions, although the quality of the foods you eat should remain high.

This particular study looked at two different variations of alternate day calorie restriction and compared the outcomes.  Both variations used an alternate day calorie restriction (as mentioned, this is typically 50% of your normal caloric intake), but on the off days, one variation used a high fat diet (45% of calories) while the other used a low fat diet (25% of calories).  The diet lasted for 2 months and had some pretty surprising results:

  1. Weight dropped 4.8% in the high fat diet and 4.2% in the low fat group.
  2. Fat mass decreased almost 12 lbs in the high fat and just over 9 lbs in the low fat group.
  3. LDL cholesterol and triglyceride dropped 18% and 13.7% (high fat) and 24.8% and 14.3% (low fat).
  4. Here’s the real info: fat free mass remained unchanged-basically all weight lost was fat (Tweet this).

Overall, in a mere 2 months, 12 pounds of pure fat was lost and LDL cholesterol tanked almost 25% in the low fat group.  The results from both groups were strong, but the low fat group seemed to have better results when it came to lowering the heart disease markers.  These are powerful results for such a simple intervention.

Of all the diets that have come and gone, this is one approach that has never really been publicized, and yet the results are strong and the ability to continue the diet as a permanent lifestyle is very realistic.

Based on this study, would you be willing to cut your calories every other day for 2 momths to lose 12 pounds of fat?