Yes, there are even keto vegans, it’s not a way of eating just for carnivores.
When I say today, I really mean over the last ten days. For about three hours every day, I’ve been listening to a summit called The Real Skinny on Fat - the Truth About Weight Loss, which is why I haven’t been much in evidence.
But now I want to share what I’ve learnt with you all, even if just to consolidate it in my own brain. Can I concisely summarise 30 hours and many pages of notes into a few shortish posts?
Some of the topics covered
A huge amount was covered, including:
• Why we were led to believe fat, especially saturated fat, is dangerous
• How keto and fasting tie in with ancestral eating
• Different types of fasting, and how to choose the easiest for you
• Different styles of keto eating
• The benefits of each type
• How they promote healthier weight and prevent metabolic syndrome
• Tips for when and how to use these tools
• How to make it easier than you might expect
One of the interesting things about this summit was how many of the presenters were doctors who have switched to using nutritional healing with their patients.
Another surprise was how many were combining keto with diets that were largely plant based. So that blew apart the idea that high fat diets need to be high animal food diets.
Today I’m just going to tackle the first point – why have we become so scared of fat? I’ve got two words for you…
Ancel Keys
Now, I’ve known for a long time about the Ancel Keys Seven Country Study, which supposedly proved that saturated fat caused heart disease. But up till now I thought he was hired by the vegetable oil manufacturers to prove how bad saturated fat was. It turns out, it was his own hypothesis, and once he had “proved” it, he went looking for sponsorship, and that contributed to the rise of the vegetable oil industry.
OK, so what happened was, he had access to a database that showed how much saturated fat was produced in each country, and the prevalence of heart disease. He “cherry picked” seven countries, out of the many available, that had a correlation between the two. This was bad science for at least two reasons:
• This was the amount of fat produced, not the amount eaten
• He ignored the countries that disproved his hypothesis
Apparently he was a very dogmatic person, who truly believed he was right, and went all out to prove it. Tragically he was successful, over time, in persuading the general population, as well as those setting dietary guidelines, that he was right.
On another note, he was also the inventor of the military K ration, so was also the inventor of the first modern processed food.
The combination of these two factors was one of the biggest public health disasters of our time. For ongoing good health we need fresh, unprocessed whole foods, and we need loads of fat for building cell walls, hormones and neurotransmitters, and many other functions.
The subsequent changes in the Western diet have created an epidemic of obesity and ill health.
There has never been any proof that fat generally, or saturated fat specifically, is bad for health. Yes, there are some fats that are bad for us, but not the ones we think. For more about good vs bad fats, see a post I wrote 2 years ago here.
The summit has finished, except for a 48 hour encore period when all of the interviews will be available to watch. It starts Friday, July 27th at 9 pm Eastern / 6 pm Pacific and the link is here. I really encourage you to go and check out what you can over the weekend.
I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about how keto and fasting relate to how our ancestors ate. We’ll also talk about different ways to fast, including a very easy starting point that everyone could do right away – spacing our meals better.
Thanks for reading & see post 2 here
Check out @woman-onthe-wing’s #makeithealthy project
Top image from the summit website, others from Pixabay.
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