I think we have come out of the era in which fat was demonized as the bad macronutrient,
but that legacy is still very much with us.
I still see when people give nutritional advice, talking about weight control, I still see
the emphasis on fatty foods and people talking about high-fat foods and cutting down on fat
consumption and low-fat foods.
Fat does not make you fat.
This is a very important concept - fat does not make you fat.
What is driving the obesity epidemic in this country is the very high consumption of high-glycemic
load carbohydrate foods which have been technically manipulated.
We need fat in the diet and you can have substantial amounts of fat in the diet.
When you try to lower fat - when you get below 25 percent of calories - food rapidly gets
uninteresting.
Fat is the major conveyor of flavor to us because many of the flavor principles are
fat-soluble, fat also gives a pleasurable mouth feel.
If you try to get fat down in the range of 10 percent of calories, which Ornish and Pritikin
diets have recommended, I don't think people are going to stay on that unless you have
a chef living with you or you live at a spa or you are so frightened about the prospect
of an invasive cardiac procedure that you are going to do that.
That is very difficult to eat food like that and it is not necessary.
In the Ornish program, where he has demonstrated reversal of heart disease, he has never studied
the dietary component apart from the other components of the program, which includes
moderate exercise, meditation, and group support.
I think if you gave a Mediterranean diet or the anti-inflammatory diet as part of that
same program, you would get better results and better compliance.
On the island of Crete, one of the stellar areas for traditional Mediterranean diet,
people eat 40 percent of calories as fat and they have very low rates of cardiovascular
disease and cancer.
The fat that they are mostly eating is olive oil, fat from fish, and fat from high-quality
whole-fat dairy products.
The fact is we need fat and the most important kinds of fats that we need are the essential
fatty acids and here is another area, which there has been an explosion of research.
We must have omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids everyday and we have to have them in the right
ratio.
It has been estimated that in Paleolithic times, we are eating these two categories
of fats in roughly equal quantities.
Now we are eating a tremendous excess of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids.
There are many reasons for that: one is that omega-3 sources are very rare in nature - it
is mostly from oily fish.
The vegetable sources of omega-3s you cannot really count on for your omega-3 needs because
they are a short chain form ALA which the body has to convert to DHA and EPA.
That conversion is inefficient at best and it varies greatly depending on your genetics
and it is interfered with if there are a lot of omega-6 fatty acids in the diet.
The main reason for the imbalance at present is that our diets have been flooded with new
sources of omega-6 fatty acids.
The main one is refined soybean oil which began to enter the food chain here in the
1920s.
It is the universal fat that is used in processed, manufactured technological-manipulated food.
It is ubiquitous because it is cheap.
It is cheap because the government artificially drives down the price of soy through subsidy
programs.
The introduction of refined soybean oil has been the major reason for this tremendous
imbalance in omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids.
This has huge consequences in terms of inflammatory status.
I usually tell people to avoid any food product with soybean oil as an ingredient - that is
a marker of low-quality food.
This, by the way, is one of the things when we get political and hopefully in the public
forum, we should all be working immediately to end these federal subsidies to soy and
corn which are responsible for making some of the unhealthiest ingredients in our food,
cheapest and most available - this is something that has to be stopped.
Another reason, which is less obvious for the increased consumption of omega-6 fatty
acids, is that the animals that we raised for meat were grazing animals that typically
ate grasses not too long in the past.
Grasses have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids in them and cows eat tremendous amounts of
them, so they build up omega-3 fatty acids in their fat.
Now we fatten our cows on grains which are omega-6 sources so that omega-3 source has
disappeared and been replaced by an omega-6 source.
This is the fact that people are eating a tremendous disparity of omega-6 fatty acids
to omega-3 fatty acids.
That is one of the most serious nutritional problems in our population is insufficient
omega-3 intake.
Huge consequences in terms of risks of chronic disease related to inflammation.
I strongly recommend using extra virgin olive oil as a main fat.
The research on olive oil is terrific and not only does olive oil have a very good fatty
acid profile, it has a unique fraction of health protective antioxidants - polyphenols,
which are related to the polyphenols found in green tea and in other natural products.
This fraction is delicate and easily damaged by oxidation so this is a reason to get good
quality extra virgin olive oil, to store it properly and not to let it be exposed to light
or air, and not heat it to too high temperatures.
An interesting compound that has been found in that fraction is called oleocanthal.
It is responsible for the peppery, biting taste of good olive oil and it has been shown
to have anti-inflammatory power equal to that of ibuprofen - that is remarkable.
I have attended some olive oil tastings in Italy
and I had never done olive oil tasting before and it is interesting to do this - you put
olive oil onto a spoon and you slurp it into your mouth mixing it with a lot of air and
coat your mouth with it, then spit it out.
When you are at olive oil tastings, you hear a lot of coughing, and good olive oils at
the very end of the taste often give you a catch in the throat and sometimes make people
cough.
Some people experience this as a peppery bite and that is very desirable and is the mark
of a good olive oil where this polyphenol fraction has not been damaged and you want
that in your diet.
Basically, you want to get people to not be afraid of fat.
I think whole-fat dairy products are much healthier than non-fat or low-fat dairy products
and they taste better.
I think that one of the great practical problems that came from this era of demonization of
fat was that there was a proliferation of low-fat and non-fat foods on the market, which
had even higher glycemic loads than the conventional versions of those.
Often, to make up for the reduction in taste and pleasure by taking fat out, people put
more sugar in.
Just looking at what happened during this era, Americans got fatter as they ate more
and more low-fat and non-fat foods, they got fatter.
Something was very wrong with the way we were thinking.