Too Fat Or Not Too Fat

I’m not a medical doctor so take what I say here with the proverbial grain of salt (though be careful you don’t get too much because salt is… well, that’s a topic for another post!)

In the last 18 months my life has changed radically… again. As many of you know I was diagnosed with diabetes so it meant an intense change in my eating habits. I listened to some of the crap being pushed by the American Diabetes Association and the certified mouth-pieces working for the doctors (the medical kind) and it just didn’t sit right with me. Something, the logical part of my brain told me, wasn’t kosher.

I’ve learned to listen to that part of by thinking apparatus and so I began doing some serious research — not in the usual places, but not with the wing-nuts, either. I found some excellent resources and I encourage you do to your own looking around. Check out Gary Taubes for starters. If you don’t find the good stuff drop me a note and I’ll point you in the right direction.

My searching shone some serious light on the whole subject of obesity (especially in children!) and diabetes. They’re linked (obesity and diabetes) of course, but not as has so long been thought. Being diabetic isn’t a “fat people’s disease”; rather both actually stem from the same underlying cause, perhaps an immune deficiency. Once we understand that so much more falls into place.

The number one external factor leading to both obesity and diabetes is high fructose corn syrup and, it actually surprised me to find this out, it is almost everywhere, in almost every processed food — it’s even being added to packaged meat! Many people who think they are watching their diet and eating well are actually doing more harm than they know.

I started looking at the ingredient and nutrition facts sections of labels on just about everything and I was shocked at what I found. Let’s take one that’s way out on the fringe if you are dieting but, none-the-less, a choice you might find yourself making.

Half and half cream is bad for you, right? But if you like it what are you to do. Well, obviously, choose fat free half and half, right? Not so fast!

Regular half and half has about 315 calories per cup and 78% of that comes from fat. That’s bad, right?

Fat free half and half has about 145 calories per cup with only about 20% of that coming from fat.

That must be better, right? Well, it’s not exactly what it seems. Never mind that fat free still means that 20% of the calories come from fat in there somewhere, there are some other interesting numbers when you look a little deeper:

Regular half and half gets only about 13% of it’s calories (about 41) from carbohydrates and has less than 1/3 of a gram of sugar per cup, but fat free half and half gets 60% of it’s calories (about 81) from carbohydrates and has a whopping 12 grams of sugar per cup! Neither, by the way, has any dietary fiber.

So, for fat free half and half that’s 81 calories from carbs with 12 grams of sugar without any fiber. That’s NOT good. Not good at all!

As a diabetic sugar is a concern. But, even more interesting is the fact that the sugar in the fat free half and half comes from one of it’s main ingredients, high fructose corn syrup. And that’s a really bad thing whether you are diabetic or not. If you are a non-diabetic trying to lose weight (or just keep weight off in the first place) these numbers are really bad. Choosing fat free can actually lead to more weight gain than choosing the high-fat product.

And, it turns out, the fat apparently isn’t as bad for you as the scare mongers and corn pushers would have you believe. If you get rid of the high fructose corn syrup and eat the right foods it turns out the fat may actually be GOOD for you!

We’re being conned, folks. Seriously conned! We need to re-think the whole calories in – calories out doctrine that’s been spoon-fed to us over the years. That spoon feeding has been more of a cause of weight gain, perhaps, and the primary cause of most dieting plans failing.

Rev. Stephen B. Henry, PhD., is a website architect, researcher, writer, philosopher, and diabetic.