Interesting Facts

Most of you with whom I keep in contact regularly know that we've adopted a "low carb" lifestyle recently. This is something my family has been talking about for YEARS, but I've never been convinced to the legitimacy of it. Then we saw "Fathead", a sort of follow up documentary to "Super Size Me" and it really started to make sense. I've been perusing their blog in recent weeks, and thought I would share their "No-Bologna Facts" with you. Emphases are mine.

• There’s never been a single study that proves saturated fat causes heart disease.
• As heart-disease rates were skyrocketing in the mid-1900s, consumption of animal fat was going down, not up. Consumption of vegetable oils, however, was going up dramatically.
• Half of all heart-attack victims have normal or low cholesterol. Autopsies performed on heart-attack victims routinely reveal plaque-filled arteries in people whose cholesterol was low (as low as 115 in one case).
• Asian Indians - half of whom are vegetarians - have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the entire world. Yup, that fatty meat will kill you, all right.
• When Morgan Spurlock tells you that a McDonald’s salad supplies almost a day’s allowance of fat, he’s basing that statement on the FDA’s low-fat/high-carbohydrate dietary guidelines, which in turn are based on … absolutely nothing. There’s no science behind those guidelines; they were simply made up by a congressional committee.
• Kids who were diagnosed as suffering from ADD have been successfully treated by re-introducing natural saturated fats into their diets. Your brain is made largely of fat.
• Many epileptics have reduced or eliminated seizures by adopting a diet low in sugar and starch and high in saturated animal fats.
• Despite everything you’ve heard about saturated fat being linked to cancer, that link is statistically weak. However, there is a strong link between sugar and cancer. In Europe, doctors tell patients, “Sugar feeds cancer.”
• Being fat is not, in and of itself, bad for your health. The behaviors that can make you fat - eating excess sugar and starch, not getting any exercise - can also ruin your health, and that’s why being fat is associated with bad health. But it’s entirely possible to be fat and healthy. It’s also possible to be thin while developing Type II diabetes and heart disease.
• Saturated fat and cholesterol help produce testosterone. When men limit their saturated fat, their testosterone level drops. So, regardless of what a famous vegan chef believes, saturated fat does not impair sexual performance.

Hmm.... sounds like a lot of the opposite of what we've been told all of our lives.

Oh, and it gets better. Here's an interesting article about---exercise!

Exercise Bologna--

The USDA came out with their recommendation to do 60-90 minutes of aerobics for fat-loss in 2005. The first ever research study on the efficacy of their advice didn’t come out until late 2007. Do you know what the study said?

Men who did moderate to vigorous (think your target heart rate zone) exercise for over 60 minutes per day, 6 days per week, for an entire year lost only 6.5lbs of body fat! That is a half pound per month, for more than 6 hours of exercise per week. Women barely lost 4lbs! (1)

So, if you’re a woman with 20lbs to lose, all you’d need is 20 hours of aerobic exercise per week and you’d be set in 12 months!

You'll have to read the article to get more details, but the gist is that exercise that doesn't build muscle isn't going to help you lose weight. That's not to say it isn't good for you--but killing yourself at the gym on the elliptical machine isn't going to equal pounds shed. So maybe we could all go back to a more primitive form of exercise for better health--walking, jumping, and PLAYING! That sounds like more fun to me, at least. Though I still kinda wanna take a belly dancing class. :)