Which is worse for you sugar or fat? Coming right up
Hey this is Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and
hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything I saw a video about
fat versus sugar on the size show channel recently and they did a great
job it's an awesome channel that does a lot of research on various topics and
then they give you the pros and cons and this was a very well researched video I
enjoyed it tremendously however I did feel that they left the viewer hanging a
little bit so I'd like to clarify a few points that I feel I know a little bit
extra about so fat has been demonized ever since about 1953 and there was one
man more involved than just about anyone else
and his name was Ancel Keys and he got this idea that fat was a really bad idea
and he brought out something called the Seven Country Studies and in this he looked
at countries that ate a lot of fat and he found a great correlation to how much
heart disease that was however he failed to mention that there was actually data
from 22 countries so Ancel Keys just cherry picked the countries that suited
his opinion and when people went back later and looked at all 22 countries
there was no correlation whatsoever as a matter of fact two countries namely
Switzerland and the Netherlands had even more fat consumption than one of the
countries that was cited in the study Finland but Switzerland and Netherlands
ate more fat than Finland and they had one third of the heart disease so there
was a lot of countries involved but mr. keys just picked the ones
suited his purposes another study was about cholesterol and there was always a
question whether dietary cholesterol was a factor in blood cholesterol and
cholesterol buildup so one study that they really liked back then was from
Russia where they had fed rabbits diet high in cholesterol and then upon
dissection later on they found that the rabbits had indeed cholesterol buildup
in their arteries that looked a lot like heart disease but they've never been
able to duplicate that in any other species and they seem to overlook the
fact that rabbits in nature have a zero cholesterol diet they are herbivores
they eat plants only so of course if you feed an herbivore a diet high in
cholesterol it's not the innate species food for them any animal that you feed
something including humans that doesn't belong for that species you're gonna
create disease and if you'd like to know more about those topics about heart
disease and cholesterol this is a great book highly recommended it's called The
Great Cholesterol Myth by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra another thing about
research that we need to be aware of research is great I'm all for forwarding
science and knowledge but we have to keep in mind that people who perform the
research have a bias they generally have something that they like to prove and
the other side of the coin is that someone has to pay for the research and
whoever pays for the research isn't interested in finding out things that
they don't want to know another great book to learn more is called undoctored
by William Davis he previously wrote wheat belly and he spent over 20 years
in the medical field as a cardiologist so he knows the ins and outs and he
shares a lot of that and he mentions about research that for example
in the area of antidepressants that 37 out of 38 trials that were positive that
produced the results that they wanted to find were indeed published but there
were also 36 studies that had negative results they didn't find out they they
found the opposite of what they wanted and 33 out of 36 of those studies were
not published so basically virtually every time that they find a study that
has the results they're looking for they publish it and most of the time that
they don't find what they're looking for they don't publish it so how do we know
what the research actually shows so first of all researchers have a bias
they have an interest they have an expectation of what they're going to
find and then in addition to that they also have to ask themselves if I find
the opposite if it finds negative implications of this then who's gonna
pay for my next study so researchers probably want to be idealistic but they
also have to be realistic and and keep their job so coming back to sugar versus
fat which one is worse we have to understand a couple of things about
sugar and when people talk about sugar they usually talk about the white
crystallized stuff that you can buy in a package or that is added to processed
foods but sugar or carbohydrates is anything that causes an insulin response
so a slice of toast or a potato or french fries or corn produces about as
much of an insulin response as sugar and it's the insulin response that we don't
want that's the damaging part about the sugar
there are other problems with sugar being empty calories and depleting
minerals and being inflammatory and and so forth but the main thing we want to
avoid is the insulin response so when it comes to
we are mostly concerned about the quantity so if you keep it carbohydrates
low enough they're not gonna mess with you too much when it comes to fat
however it's not that sugar is bad and fat is good or vice versa
we also have to look at the quality so it turns out that when it comes to sugar
it's mostly about quantity when it comes to fat it's mostly about quality so fat
has been the preferred fuel for humans for thousands of years tens of thousands
hundreds of thousands it's been the fuel source and the food source that has been
the most stable and most readily available across all seasons that
carbohydrates haven't been available to humans throughout the year but fat
typically has and fat was much easier to store so fat is the preferred fuel for
humans that's what our physiology is adapted to but it's very very important
and we look at the quality for all those tens and hundreds of thousands of years
that humans have been eating fat they have been eating fat exactly in the form
that nature provided it they have been eating animal fats and fish fats and nut
fats and so forth and today the healthy fats that we can eat has nothing to do
with whether it's saturated or unsaturated it has to do with has it
been altered so butter is a good fat extra virgin olive oil is a good fat
coconut oil is a good fat and all natural fats from healthy food from
avocados from clean nuts from clean animals animals that have been raised in
their natural habitat eating what they're supposed to eat like a cow is
supposed to eat grass if a cow eats grass the fat from the cow is healthy if
we feed him grain the fat from the cow is unhealthy so it's not that fat is
good or bad it is the quality of the fat as long as we eat natural fat that
humans haven't altered then we're in good shape some of the worst fats
obviously are all the fats that we have been sold the idea of in the last 50
years margarine vegetable oils that are
actually seed oils because they're so highly processed so damaged so heated
and bleached and deodorized that there is absolutely no nutrition in there so
is sugar or fat worse well I would have to say that sugar is by far worse
because there is nothing really good about it
there are carbohydrates from vegetables that you can eat almost unlimited and
carbs in their natural form in very low quantity not moderation according to
most people's standards low carb is what we're looking for and fat we can eat
just about as much as we like as long as we eat natural fats and in between there
we want to have a moderate amount of protein as well so we want to be careful
with just looking at research and quoting research for the reasons I
mentioned previously what we really want to do is we want to look at we want to
use common sense we want to look at historically how have humans evolved how
does human physiology function and there's great physiology textbooks and
when we combine the historical research with the physiology textbooks and
clinical results then we have the better package then we do research to further
our knowledge but we don't depend on the research we use it to enhance our
understanding so historical facts physiology and clinical results that's
the way that we understand more about how
the body really works and what we are supposed to eat as humans thanks for
watching