It's Ok - It's a Fried VEGETABLE!

Sure – frying food adds extra calories and some extra fat to your diet, but so do raw almonds and olive oil. What’s the big deal?

The short answer is this: Humans evolved to be eaters of mostly vegetables, fruits, nuts and some meat. The human body doesn’t need the amount of fat consumed when you eat fried food and moreover doesn’t know you live in the 21st century so it thinks you are desperate to eat any food you can get your hands on. The brain wants you to eat sugar fat and salt until you are sick and will make you crave as much of it as you can eat.

It is for this reason I believe fried food is the cornerstone of the obesity problem in America – second only to sugar and followed closely by a sedentary lifestyle.

But there is another possibly better answer to why fried food is so bad for you.

People describe fats as falling into two groups “good fats” and “bad fats”. Good fats are the mono and poly unsaturated fats like Omega 3 and Omega 6. Good fats have a molecule chain that is flexible and provides building blocks for your body that allow for the best cell membrane composition, allowing for optimum containment of nutrients in the cell. The American heart association suggests 25% - 35% of your daily calorie consumption come from these types of fats. A few generations ago when obesity was 2/3 of what it is today and less than 1% of the population had type II diabetes consumption of fat as a percent of calories was closer to 45%.

Bad fats are saturated and trans fats. For the most part saturated fat comes from animal products. Saturated fat is created in the body so it does not need to be consumed (which is why it’s considered bad), and the rule of thumb is that no more than 7% of the calories in your diet should come from saturated fat. So a 2,000 calorie diet should have about 15 grams of saturated fat. For reference, one tablespoon of butter has 100 calories, but 7 grams of saturated fat.

Trans Fats are in a class by themselves, and it is the trans fats that in my opinion are the REALLY bad fats. There are a few naturally occurring trans fats, but the vast majority comes from man made partially hydrogenated oils. Partially hydrogenated oils are so pervasive you probably have no idea how much of them you are eating unless you are vigilant about checking ingredient lists. The FDA suggests 1% of your diet comes from trans fats, but I would suggest that anytime you eat food where the nutrition is listed on the box it came in, make sure it has NO added trans fats. Even a small increase of trans fats in your diet can greatly increase your risk of heart disease.

Trans fats are called so because of the layout of their carbon and hydrogen molecules. Without getting too much into the chemistry, trans fats are created when you expose oils to very high heat in the presence of hydrogen; a process which causes the fat to solidify. The solidification process adds a hydrogen atom to the fat molecule which creates a stiff fat structure. It is this stiff structure which makes trans fats bad because they clog your arteries and cause heart problems. The rigid structure is also a terrible building block for cell membranes and allows vital nutrients to pass through your cells.

Trans Fats were originally marketed as a health alternative because trans fats aren’t saturated. But I think the real reason trans fats are so popular is because the food industry loves them; trans fats are cheap (they're almost always made from corn or soybean oil), it's easy to transport and it almost never goes bad. Think about it, Crisco doesn’t melt and slosh all over the place and when was the last time your shortening spoiled?

Trans Fats also affect your cholesterol in the worst way possible. Cholesterol comes in two forms LDL - bad, and HDL - good. The LDL is bad because it clogs up the arteries, and HDL is good because much like a cleaning crew it travels through the body gathering up LDL and depositing it back into the liver where it can be properly disposed of. It is easier to lower your bad cholesterol by eating more good cholesterol than it is to simply cut out bad cholesterol.  Good cholesterol is an essential part of your diet.

With that information in mind, here is a quick fat comparison:

Good fats: raise good cholesterol and lower bad cholesterol.
Saturated fats: will raise both the good and bad cholesterol.
Trans fats: lower good cholesterol and raise bad cholesterol It is this way that trans fats are a double whammy and the worst possible combination for maintaining vascular health.

Even local governments and the food industry have picked up on how bad trans fats are for you. Within the past few years both New York and California have passed bans on restaurants using artificial trans fats to cook.  Labeling on food as being trans fat free is becoming so commonplace, the FDA actually cracked down on foods advertising no trans fats as being misleading to customers who then think the so labeled products are also low in fat.  And of course, some trans fat free labeling is just absurd.

Yes, let us THINK ABOUT IT!

Avoid all partially hydrogenated oils – opt to go hungry instead of eating them. Go through your freezer and your pantry and throw all of them away – don’t think about it – just do it – do it today. There is no room for partially hydrogenated oils in your life because the bottom line is

THEY’RE KILLING YOU.

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Next time on Popular Excuses: Superfood: Ginger
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Reading List:
http://www.bantransfats.com/
Ban on Trans Fats MSNBC
http://www.fda.gov/
Harvard School of Public Health
The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods, Fats p. 81-95

I only drink Skim

The other day, I received a text from my friend, Olly.  “Hey Jes, how bad is milk for you? My mother said it was unhealthy but then totally discreditited herself by citing an Alicia Silverstone book. Wait, milk isn’t made out of corn, is it?”

The magnitude of this question is staggering and through my readings, I have also found it to be extremely boring, so I’ll try and make this speedy. The answers are “sort-a” and “yes”.


First and foremost, most diary cows are fed corn to cheaply fatten them up. So yes, there is corn in milk, and because of this the fat you drink in that milk is omega -6 fat, unless you get milk from grass fed cows. Stay tuned for a discussion on Omega-3 vs .Omega-6 fatty acids.

A lot of people don’t know this, but there is sugar in milk. Its call lactose, and you need a special enzyme to digest it, lactase. If you can drink milk now, it is because the genes which produce lactase are still turned on in your body. But for many people, especially Asians and our hunter gatherer ancestors, those genes turn off after childhood, and you quickly learned that no, milk is not healthy for you, unless you really really loved pooping and puking. It is only through a phenomenon Richard Dawkins refers to as “domestication”, that most of us can happily drink milk.

If you are wondering where our hunter gatherer ancestors managed to get all their calcium while being lactose intolerant, consider that at that same time, over 50% of the volume of their diets came from fruits and vegetables, many of which are rich in calcium including: kelp, collard greens, kale, turnip greens, almonds, parsley, dandelion greens, sunflower seeds, olives, carrots, celery, cashews, romain lettuce, artichokes and the list continues.

Anyway, back on point: Is milk healthy? I have a hard time saying “no”, I think because I’ve been inundated with body by milk adds my whole life. But I can’t find a good reason to say “yes”.

From a weight loss perspective, no. Milk isn’t going to do you much good. Milk is for babies to help them grow, and milk has a hormone in it IGF which promotes cell growth. This is a hormone IN the milk which isn’t removed, so when you get hormone free milk, realize the hormones they are referring to hormones given to most dairy cows bST. Also - when the dairy industry hires people like Brooke Shields to wear a milk mustache and talk about how they owe their bodies to a milk based diet, they are referring to the studies shown where increased calcium in diets is linked to weight loss (hint: if you want to lose weight by increasing the calcium in your diet, make your diet consist of 10x more veggies - there is an added bonus of veggies being good for you in about 10,000 other ways also).

Remember also, lactose is a simple sugar, easily converted into body fat. If you try and make milk lower in calories by taking the fat out of it, you end up with just sugar. I will talk about this in a later article in depth, but removing fat from milk removes the element which lets your body know you are full and satiated - the FAT (fat releases into the body at a slower rate than simple sugars)!

So now you might be thinking, its ok to drink milk, as long as I’m not trying to lose weight. The problem is that most the fat in milk is animal fat, most of which is saturated. Saturated fat (of which you NEED none) has a bad reputation, and has a history of being linked to heart disease (however, that point is contested in the Reuters article linked below). For the most part, a person’s diet should be limited to about 16 grams of saturated fat a day. If you have a 2 serving glass of whole milk (we already went through why it shouldn’t be fat free milk) you are already at 2/3 your daily allotment.

Is milk healthy? If you aren’t trying to lose weight AND you don’t any other animal fat, I guess milk isn’t bad for you. If the articles suggesting a small amount of saturated fat is good for you, and the only animal fat you eat is from milk, then maybe it is healthy. If you only ingest calcium from milk, and have a diet high in protein, then yes, milk is essential because you need the calcium to replenish what the protein leeched from your bones.

On a personal level, I don’t drink milk, I drink unsweetened soy and almond milk. Once in a while I’ll have a Green Tea Latte from Starbucks and because their soy is sweetened, I’ll ask them to add whole milk. I’m still alive and my weigh loss is still continuing (albeit at a snail’s pace).

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I am going to end here - there are quite a few books written on milk, and you could probably make a college major out of studying the stuff. This entry touched on a ton of other topics I will discuss in much depth in the coming months, but I think because I am so obsessed with Omega-3 right now, next week on Popular Excuses, we’ll cover Omega-3 vs. Omega-6 fatty acids.

Feel free to leave comments challenging my position or ask questions about what I’ve written. If I can’t answer your questions, I’m happy to look up any answers I can.

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Reading List
The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins p31-33
The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods p117-118
Cliff Sheets, Lean bodies p44
Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution - p87-88
Food, Inc. P 232
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61341020100204

Additional Information on the Industry from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=1972363&m=1972364