TPower81’s BodyBlog

I’ve been thinking a bit, as I often do, about things going on in the world and why they are so.  I’m not a nutritionist by any means but I really do think that part of the reason why our society is so padded is because of the whole anti-fat movement in the 90’s.  You look at the ww2 generation that is slowly and peacefully exiting this world and you see people who have eaten eggs whole, butter and not margarine, bacon, whole milk, and red meat all their lives!  Yet, they still remained relatively healthy.

 I think part of this is due to the fact that the latter generation was very hand on, active and not so much of the "sit in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day".  In addition though, I think that dietary fat plays an important role in body composition.

 I remember growing up and all the sudden fitness took the trend of low fat, fat free foods.  All the sudden people were scared to eat fat for fear that it would get them fat!  What I think has happened though is people have replaced fat calories with carb calories.  This has led to two problems.

First of all, the carb increase.  It can be difficult at times to pick good carbs to eat.  Most of the carbs that people eat these days are processed and not low glycemic by any means.  I’m not argueing all carbs eaten have to be low glycemic, only that the average person is not paying attention to this at all when picking foods to eat.  The effect is the body is storing more energy as fat for later use.  It has gone from being in balance, to having too much energy, therefore storing it for later use.

The second thing that I think has happened is the body has gotten used to using carbs as an energy source.  The flip side of this is that fat is no longer breaked down as effectively as before.  A person on a low fat diet doesn’t really notice this because they aren’t taking in fat.  What I think the problem with this is that in addition to not dealing with fat intake very well, the body also is unfamiliar with breaking down fat stores in the body for energy.  In fact, in most cases the body may not even touch these fat stores, instead catabolizing itself and burning muscle for energy over the fat.  Muscle is much easier to get energy from, and if the body is not used to or equipped to transfering fat to energy because there is no fat in the diet, then it will produce "skinny fat" or simply just obese people that can’t figure out why they can’t lose fat while on a 1500 calorie diet.

In my opinion, fat needs to be reintroduced to society as not being all that bad.  No fear, guys, eating fat isn’t going to make you fat.  I hope to show this in the coming weeks while on "The Anabolic Diet".  My calories are coming from roughly 60% fat sources, 35% protein, and 5% carbs.

If you have any comments on this, I’d love to hear them.  Once again, I’m not a nutrition expert at all, and most of the time I have no idea how the body works, lol.  Just saying, the way I see it right now, the fat scare of the 90’s combined with all the simple sugar in a lot of today’s pre-packaged foods has made a lot of people overweight.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 7:57 am and is filed under Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.