If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s work, you may already know how, decades ago, Americans were emphatically urged to cut fat out of their diet in order to avoid heart disease.  The promise: the more foods you converted to low fat and nonfat versions, the better your health would be.  The food industry had invented many processed foods that would improve your “well-being.”  That was over 3 decades ago, and if you haven’t noticed already, low fat diets don’t work! 

Actually, obesity and heart disease rates are steadily increasing.  Buying technically fat free foods, we turned our attention away from the foods naturally low in dangerous fats .  Whole, plant-based foods and lean animal proteins should have been the focus of a healthy diet but we succumbed to the marketing genius of the food industry.  We believed that their packaged fat free cookies and fat free cream cheese were actually good for us and ate them in excess and guilt-free.

The secret that most people do not know is that the food industry did a classic bait and switch. To create fake foods with no fat, they put fake sugar and refined starch in its place on the ingredient list.  (Starch, by the way, is just a bunch of sugars hitched together and used by the body as a storage form of sugar.)  Eating foods with man-made high fructose corn syrup and refined starches is like a sugar bomb going off in your body.  The body scurries to protect itself from this flood of sugar and starts packaging it off as starch initially.  Starch storage space is limited so the rest of the sugar is converted into dangerous fat.  You read that right- sugar can actually turn into fat.  Eating foods with unnaturally high amounts of sugar (sugar bombs) found in these processed foods is very different from eating natural sugar found in whole foods.  For example, when you eat a whole apple, the sugar slowly seeps out because the fiber in the apple keeps the bomb from exploding.  

Processed food, basically meaning anything that has an ingredient list on its packaging, has quietly been causing lists of health problems, many times by using the claims of being “fat free,” “no cholesterol,” “no trans fats.”  You can see the toll it’s taking on our children.  They are the living “guinea pigs” of what eating low fat & high sugar diets from white bread, white pasta, white rice, white potatoes, boxed foods, sugary drinks and sugary foods can lead to in the end.  In doctors’ offices around the nation, kids are getting adult diseases and adults are getting elderly diseases.  Obviously, going low fat by going high sugar/starch has not proven to be the right health choice.

So, how should you eat?  Well, go back to the basics. 

·         Eat good fats from olive oil, salmon, walnuts, and avocados

·         Eat good carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables and non-processed whole grains

·         Eat good proteins from beans, nuts, fish and poultry

·         Eat like your ancestors- meaning eat more food from the earth and less from a box or wrapper

·         Never eliminate a whole food category- so don’t go from fat free to “no carb”

·         Visit http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/PAG00361/anti-inflammatory-food-pyramid.html

 Integrative medicine has known for a long time that nutrition is one of the best treatments for chronic disease and symptoms that either affect your quantity of life (like heart attacks and cancer) or your quality of life (like arthritis, depression and digestive issues).  You control 100% of what you feed yourself.  So, make educated decisions the next time you visit your supermarket and don’t fall for the low fat marketing lies.