Obesity is the result of inappropriate lifestyle choices, and unfortunately, our government has done an abysmal job at disseminating accurate information about diet and health. For example, conventional advice that is driving public health in the wrong direction includes:
- Avoiding saturated fat: The myth that saturated fat causes heart disease has undoubtedly harmed an incalculable number of lives over the past several decades, even though it all began as little more than a scientifically unsupported marketing strategy for Crisco cooking oil. Most people actually need … to include healthful saturated fats such as organic, pastured eggs, avocados, coconut oil, real butter and grass-fed beef in order to optimize their health
- Cutting calories: Not all calories are created equal, and counting calories will not help you lose weight if you’re consuming the wrong kind of calories
- Reducing your cholesterol to extremely low levels: Cholesterol is actually NOT the major culprit in heart disease or any disease, and the guidelines that dictate what number your cholesterol levels should be to keep you “healthy” are fraught with conflict of interest — and have never been proven to be good for your health
- Choosing diet foods will help you lose weight: Substances like Splenda and aspartame may have zero calories, but your body isn’t fooled. When it gets a “sweet” taste, it expects calories to follow, and when this doesn’t occur it leads to distortions in your biochemistry that may actually lead to weight gain
This is just a tiny sampling of the misleading information on weight and obesity disseminated by our government agencies. A more complete list of conventional health myths could easily fill an entire series of books. The reason behind this sad state of affairs is the fact that the very industries that profit from these lies are the ones funding most of the research; infiltrating our regulatory agencies; and bribing our political officials to support their financially-driven agenda through any number of legal, and at times not so legal, means.
I believe there are two primary dietary recommendations that could make all the difference in the world, were they to be widely advocated. Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen anytime soon, because accepting these recommendations would mean cutting profitability for the food industry—not to mention the fact that major health agencies would have to confess that they’ve been misleading you for a very long time!
The two primary keys I’m talking about are:
- Severely restricting carbohydrates (sugars, fructose, and grains) in your diet, and
- Increasing healthy fat consumption
While health authorities insist that sugar is fine “in moderation,” and that grains are an essential part of a healthy diet and can actually help you prevent heart disease, they fail to take into consideration that:
- Fructose is the NUMBER ONE source of calories in the US, which means our consumption of it is far from “moderate.” As stated earlier, this is not at all surprising when you consider that fructose, primarily in the form of cheap high fructose corn syrup, is in just about everything—even food items you’d never expect would need it, including diet foods and ‘enhanced’ water products
- Refined carbohydrates (breakfast cereals, bagels, waffles etc) quickly breaks down to sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause insulin resistance, which is the number one underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease known to man, including heart disease.
Whilst fructose is not used quite so widely in UK products, anyone who reads ingredients labels will be only too aware that most packaged products in the UK contain a good deal of sweetening, quite often as glucose syrup as well as sucrose. Mercola’s guidelines above, to avoid sugars and refined grains are of course central to Nutritionhelp’s approach in dealing with gut ecology. Very often clients will lose weight while on a Nutritionhelp protocol. However, if you are overweight, and it still isn’t shifting while following Nutritionhelp guidelines, it may be helpful to request contact with one of our associate nutritionists to see if other factors are influencing weight, such as food allergy or adrenal stress for example.
