Can you think of a fundamental reason not to expect that saturated fat is healthy and good?
Stop and think about it. Forget everything you think you know—which, if we're talking knowledge, is possibly not much, especially if you’re just regurgitating what the “experts” say. Why would saturated fat not be healthful, beneficial? Because it's so tasty, and we naturally want to indulge in pleasures from "the devil's playground"? Does that make sense?
Could it be, rather, that it's because it's so good for us that we have a such a taste for it?
Why wouldn't it be healthful, naturally, when you find it in large percentages in the animal fats associated with all meats? Saturated fat is even in the animal fat associated with human meat, in roughly the same proportion as that found in pigs.
If we were all thinking straight—perhaps like hunter-gatherers responsible on a daily basis to look around, observe, think, integrate, plan, and exercise extreme caution when it comes to feeding ourselves—we might scoff at the notion of animal fat being "bad for us."
Would you expect these super-informed and experienced hunter-gatherers to eschew animal products in favor of leaves and various fibers? You wouldn't, would you? What you would expect is for them to go after the most dense nutrition they could safely source: various animals of all kinds, including their fat, their saturated fat.
That’s what they've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, which is very clear from the anthropological record. The skeletal remains of primitive hunter-gatherers are larger in stature, with healthier, straighter teeth and wider dental bridges (no braces!) when compared to those of ancient agricultural populations, or even modern humans.
So, given our millions of years of evolution, one would naturally expect saturated fat to be not only "OK," or, "taken in moderation," but actually healthful! Really healthful. One would expect it to be quite an astounding shocker if that wasn't so. In fact, the level of unabashed shock at such speculation should have been so profound as to have demanded decades of contradictory-free hypotheses, and gold standard research leading up to infallible proof—before even giving it a second thought.
Curse those with the audacity to sweep aside 2.5 million years of evolution to implicate as unhealthy a core building block of our very survival as animals in the wild!
Eat Fat To Lose Weight
Fat is king, folks. In terms of evolutionary logic, it has to be. Pound for pound, fat has more than twice the energy of either proteins or carbohydrates. It was treasured above all other energy sources by our primitive ancestors. Next were the organs, and only then, the muscle meat.
All diets are high-fat diets. Let's say you have 50 pounds of excess fat you'd like to lose in order to get down to around 15% body fat, or thereabouts. Assuming you'll be successful, what does that imply? It means, necessarily, that you're going to metabolize 50 pounds of your own fat in order to accomplish your objective.
Even if you attempt do this by means of a "low-fat" diet, it's still high-fat, as you've got 50 pounds or 175,000 calories worth of fat to burn through. If you do it in six months, that's almost 1,000 calories of fat per day. Presuming a basal metabolism of 2,500 calories, and a dietary intake of 20% fat (a "low-fat diet"), then you'd be eating 300 calories of fat and 1,200 calories of protein and carbs combined, for a total consumption of 1,500 calories. The remaining 1,000 would be coming from your own fat, released into your bloodstream and metabolized. Out of the total 2,500, 1,300, or about 50%, are calories from fat.
. . . And since your own body fat, like that of a pig, is about 35% saturated, one wonders why people aren’t afraid to diet, for fear of clogging their own arteries while releasing all that saturated fat into their bloodstream!
You've got to burn through your own fat to lose fat, so it stands to reason that a diet that both satisfies your hunger and keeps insulin low so your fat stores can more easily be released is the best strategy you can implement. You're not hungry (or as hungry) because you're getting the energy from your own fat.
Someone on a low-fat, balanced, "everything-in-moderation" diet is usually perpetually hungry. The excessively high intake of carbohydrates means that insulin remains chronically elevated and body fat remains locked in. They're hungrier, lose less weight, often lose lean mass, and ultimately fail to maintain the diet. Yes, on a lower-carb diet you’re less hungry because you’re getting plenty of fat—your own fat!
Quit dying on crap, people. Live. Eat in luxury. Dump the notion that the eating of animals is the original sin of nutrition, which only serves to make you feel guilty and defeated each time you give in and so enjoy that grilled rib-eye smothered in rich, sweet, garlicky butter. If you didn't feel guilty for so enjoying what's so natural, you could quickly replace all the crap with actual good food. Once you go through the withdrawals (and you will), you can emerge into a world where food is fun and makes you feel genuinely good. It'll make you look a lot better, too.
Additional Resources
- Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths and Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You, has a three part series on saturated fat at Spacedoc.com.
