Has Low Fat Failed the Test Of Time?
by Alan Watson • Circle Pines, MN

Since 1980, the U.S. low fat Dietary Guidelines have recommended that we consume up to 65 percent of calories as carbohydrates – which includes fruit, fruit juices, a variety of vegetables, grains, grain products, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup. According to the federal Dietary Guidelines, a low fat, high carbohydrate diet would keep us thin and help us prevent diabetes and heart disease.

Decades later, we must ask, how are we doing? In fact, after three decades of low fat = good health, Americans are fatter and sicker than ever. We complied and lowered our fat and cholesterol intake but twothirds of Americans are overweight and a whopping ten percent suffer from type II diabetes. Heart disease has not gone down as promised, and slow, suffocating heart failure is the #1 Medicare expenditure.

I believe what’s wrong with the American diet has nothing to do with cholesterol and dietary fat; instead, it’s the over-consumption of carbohydrates — especially those easily-digested refined carbohydrates made from highly processed sugars and grains, including high fructose corn syrup.

As an example, all dry boxed breakfast cereals - regardless of how much sugar they contain - raise blood sugar (they are high glycemic). Blood sugar has a narrow healthy range. Chronically elevated blood sugar - eating excess carbohydrates on a regular basis - is the common denominator of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

When you consume excess carbohydrates, your body responds by flooding the bloodstream with insulin. Insulin escorts sugar (glucose) into our cells for energy and then directs the liver to turn the excess into body-made fats called triglycerides. Elevated triglycerides — not cholesterol levels — reliably predict the risk of heart disease.

Elevated blood sugar and triglycerides (body-made-fats) create systemic inflammation in the body that damages arteries and leads to plaque buildup and sticky clot-prone blood. Excess carbohydrates — not cholesterol and dietary fat — induce the blood fat abnormalities that signal increased risk of heart disease.

Remember, when you eat protein and fat (as in eggs fried in butter), you do not raise blood sugar and your body uses the protein and fat to make cells, tissues, and organs. (We are made of protein, fat, and water.) While dietary fat is used for energy, it is also a precursor to important hormones and is a key structural component of the trillions of cell membranes that make up our bodies.

The only thing our bodies can do with excess calories from carbohydrates is convert them into body-made-fat (triglycerides). Excess carbohydrate consumption, which leads to elevated blood sugar and chronically high insulin levels, disrupts homeostasis - creating injury, inflammation, and plaque in the arteries.

Artery plaques are a response to injury. Plaque is primarily smooth muscle cells, calcium, connective tissue, white blood cells, and some cholesterol and fat (mostly unsaturated fat). Proliferation of plaques may occur, not because of simple elevations in blood cholesterol, but because of chronic elevations of blood sugar and insulin that directly damage or weaken the structure of the arterial wall.

Excess carbohydrate intake — especially sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and highly processed grains — leads to nutritional deficiencies, elevated homocysteine, emotional and physiological stress, and microbial infection. In addition, highly processed trans fatty acids (TFA’s), and excess omega-6 fat intake and/or deficient omega-3 fats promote blood vessel damage and heart disease unrelated to blood cholesterol levels or natural dietary fat intake.

Yes, just about everything you’ve heard about America’s most demonized nutrients — cholesterol and dietary fat — is wrong. Nonetheless, the new 2015 Dietary Guidelines will likely continue to promote the excess sugars and grains that are the underlying common denominator of obesity, diabetes, and coronary heart disease.

Alan Watson is a you-can’t-trust-the-experts “patient advocate” with 20 years’ experience in the nutritional supplement business. For more information, please call 1-800-229-3663 or go to www.dietHeartPublishing.com.