Enzyme Nutrition and Raw Food: Fact or Fiction?

Certain foods, such as mushrooms, are actually healthier when cooked.

by John P. Thomas
Health Impact News

In a previous article I discussed the nutritional considerations of eating vegetables raw or cooked. The research showed strong support for eating a combination of raw and cooked vegetables, because both options provide nutritional benefits.

I am sure that some who read the first article are concerned about enzymes. They have chosen to eat vegetables raw for the sake of enzyme preservation. Food is considered raw when it has not been heated above 116-118 degrees F. The discussion of enzymes and raw food naturally leads to a consideration of the lifetime work of Dr. Edward Howell, author of Enzyme Nutrition.¹ Dr. Howell advocated a raw food diet to protect the naturally occurring enzymes that are in food, thinking that would preserve the enzymes that are in the human body. He believed this would provide for optimal health and longevity. His theory has 4 main points:

1. Enzymes in raw food contain the “life force,” which is transferred to the body when the food is eaten. This “life force” enhances vitality and longevity. When cooked food is eaten, the body must use up some of its own “life force”/”enzyme potential,” because cooked food does not contain any life force/live enzymes.
2. The enzymes present in raw foods provide significant help for the digestion of the foods themselves once the foods enter the human digestive system.
3. The body has a finite “enzyme potential” for manufacturing digestive enzymes, which must be preserved to promote health and longevity. The body permanently depletes a portion of its enzymes whenever cooked food is eaten.
4. Cooking destroys the enzymes in raw food, which forces the body to produce more of its own digestive enzymes than would otherwise be necessary to digest the food.²

Scientific research has advanced in many areas since Dr. Howell wrote his book. As a result I think it is desirable to take a fresh look at his enzyme theory. I took time to read through Dr. Howell’s book,Enzyme Nutrition, published in 1985. I will share some of what I observed.

Presuppositions

Presuppositions are foundational beliefs that research is built upon. Often we don’t examine our presuppositions because we think that our beliefs are so obvious that no one would ever question them.

At one time in history, everyone believed that the world was flat. This is an example of a presupposition that was ultimately replaced as new information became available. The adoption of the new supposition brought substantial change to scientific research in physics. Let’s take a look at some of Dr. Howell’s presuppositions and teachings to see how they stand up over time. I have stated my interpretation of Dr. Howell’s presuppositions as bold headings. I will begin by addressing the four main points stated above concerning his theory, and then add some additional considerations.

Enzymes are Life

Main Point 1: Enzymes in raw food also contain the “life force,” which is transferred to the body when the food is eaten. This “life force” enhances vitality and longevity. When cooked food is eaten, the body must use up some of its own “life force”/”enzyme potential,” because cooked food does not contain any life force/live enzymes.

The Forward to Dr. Howell’s book states,

For enzymes operate on both chemical and biological levels, and science cannot measure or synthesize their biological or life energy.

This biological force is the very core of every enzyme. Various names such as life energy, life force, life principle, vitality, vital force, strength, and nerve energy have been offered to describe this energy. Without the life energy of enzymes we would be nothing more than a pile of lifeless chemical substances—vitamins, minerals, water, and proteins. (page viii, Enzyme Nutrition)

Most certainly, enzymes are an important part of living organisms, but do they actually contain life itself? Dr. Howell elevates enzymes above all other elements of nutrition and dietary health by giving them the unique place of being a life force. This is only a theory. He presented evidence showing that enzymes contain energetic emanations as measured by Kirlian photography, but these electro-magnetic emanations are not life itself. To make such statements is to offer a presupposition without scientific proof.

Enzymes in Food are Aids to Digestion

Main Point 2: The enzymes present in raw foods provide significant help for the digestion of foods themselves once the foods enter the human digestive system.

Dr. Howell states,

Upon reflection, it becomes obvious that enzymes exist in all living things and become food enzymes when the food is eaten. But until I found out how ultrasensitive enzymes are to heat, I did not realize that the human race had been trying to get along without a whole category of food ingredients since cooking began. (page 121)

I tried to find research that supports the theory that the enzymes contained in the raw food we eat actually become digestive enzymes once we consume the food. This is a very common belief. But, I was unable to find any scientific proof for it.

There are two types of enzymes. Those that exist within the cells of living organisms, and in the case of organisms that have complex digestive systems containing stomachs and intestines, there are digestive enzymes. I could not find confirmation that the enzymes in our food will become digestive enzymes once the food has been consumed.

I suspect that the enzymes in food are actually destroyed by stomach acid. I also wonder about the very small amount of naturally occurring enzymes that are contained in many leafy vegetables. Are there really enough enzymes to produce a digestive effect? The enzymes in vegetables help the plant decompose in the natural environment. But, I cannot find any scientific evidence that the natural plant enzymes digest food in the stomach. This appears to be speculation.

Dr. Howell states,

The aging of meat and game to promote its tenderness and enhance its flavor has been practiced for a long time. The aging process consists of keeping the product at the proper environment of moisture and temperature. This allows the enzyme cathepsin within the tissues to slowly digest the hung meat by a process not unlike that which occurs in the digestive tract and which is known as autolysis. This is a good example of the operation of food enzymes. In those carnivores swallowing an entire animal, the catheptic enzymes of the prey become food enzymes and act the same way in the stomach of the host as they do when aging meat. (page 41, Enzyme Nutrition)

The enzymes in plants and animals certainly work in the natural environment to degrade the organisms (to recycle it) after it dies. However, do enzymes work that way in the human digestive system? Once again this is speculation. The natural function of the human digestive system is to breakdown and digest all parts of the food we eat. The enzymes in food are not somehow selectively preserved so that they can digest food. They are digested by the body along with all the other components of the raw food that we eat.

Every Organism will Die when Its Finite Amount of Enzymes have been Exhausted

Main Point 3: The body has a finite “enzyme potential” for manufacturing digestive enzymes, which must be preserved to promote health and longevity. The body permanently depletes a portion of its enzymes whenever cooked food is eaten.

Dr. Howell stated,

We can learn from this research that if you have young enzymes at age 80 you should be in the prime of life—not old. If you take in enzyme reinforcements during the younger years, your enzymes at 80 will be more like those at 40. (page 28)

Dr. Howell focused his medical career on promoting the consumption of raw food, based on the belief that every living organism was born with a finite amount of enzymes, and when these enzymes were used up, the organism would die. Thus, he taught that people should eat as much raw food as possible, because if food does not contain enzymes, then we must use our own storehouse of enzymes to digest food, which will eventually exhaust our finite supply. Death occurs once enzymes have been depleted. He relied on various insect and animal studies to try to prove his theory. The studies measured total enzyme content in Daphnia, grasshoppers, potato beetles, fireflies, nematodes, and rats at different ages. The findings showed that younger adult insects and animals had high enzymes and old insects and animals had low enzymes. Other studies measured the enzymes in human saliva and found a similar pattern. Old people had fewer enzymes than young people.

If his enzyme theory is true, then a person should be able to extend life indefinitely. We would expect that a person who eats only raw food and takes enzyme supplementation should be able to live much longer than people who eat cooked food and who do not take enzyme supplementation. This is a theory without any proof. The proof will not be found in animal studies or insect studies or in deductive reasoning, but in actual research conducted in human subjects over the course of a lifetime. I will be glad to be corrected if I am wrong, but I am unaware of people living to the age of 120 or older, because they only ate raw food and consumed supplemental enzymes. The reduction in enzyme levels as people and other organisms age is not necessarily the one and only cause of aging or death.

Cooking and Processing of Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Fats

Main Point 4: Cooking destroys the enzymes in raw food, which forces the body to produce more of its own digestive enzymes than would otherwise be necessary to digest the food.

Dr. Howell states,

The secret of the good health of the carnivorous Eskimo is not that he eats meat, but that he forbids his personal enzymes to digest all of it. We can do the same with proteins, carbohydrates, and fats from plant foods. (page 47, Enzyme Nutrition)

I will accept the resources sited by Dr. Howell that Eskimos allowed the process of autolysis and bacterial fermentation to take place in stored meat before they consumed it. However, my problem with the preceding statement, and with the totality of the theory he is promoting, is that Dr. Howell has a presupposition that if cooking is bad for some types of food, then it is bad for all foods. He treats proteins, carbohydrates, and fats as if his enzyme theory applied identically to each type of food. For example, he does not always differentiate between the harmful effects of highly processed/refined carbohydrate and other forms of carbohydrate. He concludes that bread is bad, because it is cooked. Perhaps bread is unhealthy because it is made of highly refined carbohydrate, which almost instantly turns into sugar once it enters the body. Based on more recent research, it is clear that most people today have a fundamental problem with their metabolism because of the large quantities of carbohydrates found in the typical American diet. This problem manifests in the high rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome. The problem is not caused by the cooking of the carbohydrates. Rather the problem is the quantity consumed and the highly refined and denatured quality of the carbohydrates.

Dr. Howell very clearly articulated the problem with one carbohydrate: white sugar. He called it a skeletal food. But at the time he wrote his book, he did not seem to understand the rapid conversion process of other forms of carbohydrate into sugars. We now know that the cooking of carbohydrate is much less important than the actual nature of carbohydrate itself, especially for people with damaged digestive systems.

Enzymes are the Last and Final Revelations in Nutritional Knowledge

Dr. Howell stated,

In 1932, when I discovered food enzymes, I counted myself with the very few in believing we possessed the last and final revelations in nutritional knowledge. (page 121)

Among the many thousands of species of creatures living on this earth, only humans and some of their domestic animals try to live without food enzymes. And only these transgressors of nature’s laws are penalized with defective health. We cannot ascribe poor human health to vitamin or mineral deficiencies because foods have been fortified to the hilt with these. (page 17)

Dr Howell considers the discovery of enzymes to be more important than all other dietary factors. He bases human health on the presence or absence of enzymes in the diet and in the body. It is short-sighted to ascribe health or illness to only one factor such as enzymes.  And dangerous to assume that food fortified with synthetic vitamins and dead minerals will support health. Many important vitamins have been discovered since 1932. Our modern agricultural methods have diminished the vitamin and mineral content of food and have added toxic ingredients that are making us all sicker. A simple reliance on enzymes will not correct the mineral and vitamin deficiencies of low quality food.

Man should have Built-in Cooking Equipment

Let the reader consider that a human baby, like an infant animal, is given raw food having a full complement of enzymes, from the breasts of its mother. If it needed cooked food for survival, it would have been provided with it. But in fact, a newborn infant has no need for cooked food. A cooking stove, which is a human invention, does not come permanently attached as a part of the anatomy of a newly born infant! (page 71, Enzyme Nutrition)

This is an interesting argument. Thus, we could also say, if a human being required clothing for warmth, we would be born wearing clothing and would not need to manufacture it. I agree that a new born baby needs only the milk of its mother, but it seems rather silly to put forth the argument that the lack of a built in stove in our anatomy means that we should not cook food later in life.

Food should be Pure and Unadulterated

no one has the knowledge to say that taking something away from food is ”safe,” or adding a foreign element to food is ”safe. (page 71, Enzyme Nutrition)

There is considerable wisdom in the preceding statement. The modern agribusiness model and corporate genetic engineering programs assume that people possess the wisdom necessary to fundamentally alter food for the sake of profitability without harm to our health. Dr. Howells’s preceding statement reflects his passion for not disturbing the purity of natural food. This is noteworthy.

Cancer and Heart Disease are the result of Disturbed Metabolism and the loss of Food Enzymes

It is decidedly unbecoming for those possessing the tools of science to close their eyes to the possibility that those diseases which are human trademarks, such as cancer and heart disease, are the products of disturbed metabolism induced partly by the hidden machinations of food enzyme deficiency. (page 71, Enzyme Nutrition)

Dr. Howell had an accurate view on many aspects of nutrition. His condemnation of white sugar should be a clear and powerful warning to everyone who reads his book. Also, his promotion of raw milk continues to stand the test of time, not only because of the enzyme content of raw milk, but because of the entire network of beneficial nutrients contained in raw milk and other raw dairy products, which he did not discuss. His elevation of enzymes to an exalted position above all other dietary factors cannot be supported in the area of heart disease and cancer given recent research. Recent research is confirming that the high incidence of heart disease is linked to prolonged consumption of refined carbohydrates, and cancer is linked to prolonged consumption of hydrogenated fat and other industrial oils. The problem is not cooked carbohydrate or cooked oils; the problem is highly processed and denatured industrial food.

The Perversion of Food by Cooking Leads to Obesity and Poor Health

If utilization of raw foodstuffs proceeded at a normal rate for these millions of years and we step in and do something to food, such as cooking it, which increases its utilization and absorption beyond the normal, this amounts to a perversion. If obesity is the result, it certainly is not wholesome. And it does not require deep insight to perceive that the evil consequences of such an assault on the endocrine balance may later hand us a legacy of many apparently unrelated pathological entities. (page 73, Enzyme Nutrition)

Even after reading his book, I was not convinced that his enzyme theory was true. I just could not make the leap from the weak research data that he offered to his conclusions. I remain unconvinced that cooking is a perversion. There is a great difference between apparent correlation and actual causation. Much of Dr. Howell’s theories are based on observed relationships, which he considers to be causative. Causation requires the isolation of research variables to eliminate other possible causes, which might be stronger than his enzyme theory for life and longevity. However, I must agree wholeheartedly with his last statement, which should cause us to closely examine the health of Americans.

If obesity is the result, it certainly is not wholesome. And it does not require deep insight to perceive that the evil consequences of such an assault on the endocrine balance may later hand us a legacy of many apparently unrelated pathological entities. (page 73, Enzyme Nutrition)

Widespread obesity is one of the marks of a culture in dietary distress and nutritional decline. I do not believe that the cooking of food is the cause of obesity and illness in America. Rather it is the high carbohydrate/low fat diet (filled with omega 6 oils, processed food, and genetically modified organisms) which is bringing us down to the pit of poor health and needless suffering. There are many diets that produce improvements in health. The key factor is not enzymes, but the elimination of unhealthy food. When highly refined carbohydrate foods and unhealthy oils are removed from the diet, then health will improve.

SUMMARY

Dr. Howell’s enzyme theories do not stand up to close examination. He did not present evidence to fully support his theory when he wrote his book, and such scientific evidence is still lacking. In order for me to be convinced of his theory, I would need to see scientific evidence that proves that the enzymes in raw food actually assist with digestion when food is eaten. I would need to see proof that we actually have a finite amount of enzymes and that the conservation of those enzymes will extend life. I would need to see actual research that shows that it takes more digestive enzymes to digest cooked food than is needed to digest raw food.

Regarding his last point that enzymes actually contain the life force that gives life to plants and animals, I think he is quite wrong on this point. If it was true that enzymes are life, then those who are manufacturing enzymes would also be manufacturing life itself. Enzymes are critical to multiple life processes, but they are not life itself.

See Also:

Raw versus Cooked Food: Which is Healthier?

Resources

1.Enzyme Nutrition: Unlocking the Secrets of Eating Right for Health Vitality and Longevity, Dr. Edward Howell, M.D., Avery a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1985.

2. List adapted from: “Do ‘Food Enzymes’ Enhance Digestive Efficiency, Longevity?” Retrieved 4/17/2014. http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-2b.shtml

Why Low-Fat Diets Make You Fat

by Natasha Longo
PreventDisease.com

Governments here and abroad have been cautioning the public for decades on the dangers of high fat diets. Their claims based on “their science” concluded that it’s best to avoid fat because of its extra calories – and saturated fats raise the risk of heart disease. You’ll still see this on most food pyramids regulated by government policy on diet and nutrition. However, just as mandated healthcare policies fail at the federal level, so do those related to nutrition. This low-fat mantra has been questioned for years by clinicians and nutritional scientists – not least because it has failed to halt the obesity epidemic. The fact is, contrary to official advice by our diet dictocrats, high-fat diets lower blood sugar, improve blood lipids, and reduce obesity.

High-Fat Diets Have Better Effects on Blood Sugar
One of the problems is that there is consistent inverse association in the percentage of energy coming from fats and sugars. Research published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition shows why people find it hard to follow government guidelines to cut their fat and sugar intake at the same time — a phenomenon known as the sugar-fat seesaw.

That’s no surprise as previous studies such as a two-year dietary studypublished in the journal Diabetologia showed that food with a lot of fat and few carbohydrates has a better effect on blood sugar levels and blood lipids. Despite the increased fat intake with a larger portion of saturated fatty acids, their lipoproteins did not get worse. Quite the contrary — the HDL, or ‘good’ cholesterol, content increased on the high fat diet.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows that a carefully scheduled high-fat diet can lead to a reduction in body weight and a unique metabolism in which ingested fats are not stored, but rather used for energy at times when no food is available. The results were published in The FASEB Journal under the title “Timed high-fat diet resets circadian metabolism and prevents obesity”.

Outdated Understanding of Science 

Professor David Lawrence, an expert in nutrition and obesity data analysis, said recently in the journal BMC Medicine that the idea the idea of all calories being equal is flawed and based ‘on an outdated understanding of the science’.

Calories from different sources have different effects on the body, with calories from carbohydrates more likely to encourage weight gain.

Calories from different sources have different effects on the body, with calories from carbohydrates more likely to encourage weight gain.

Not only is the calorie theory under attack, but evidence is also emerging to show that lowering fat might not cut heart-disease risk after all.

A major study published in the authoritative New England Journal of Medicine compared the clinical benefits of a conventional low-fat diet with two types of Mediterranean diet, which are naturally considerably higher in fat.

The study had to be stopped early because the heart attack and stroke rate in the Mediterranean options was so much lower it was deemed irresponsible to keep patients on the conventional diet.

Relevance of Glycemic Load 

A study led by Cara Ebbeling, PhD, associate director and David Ludwig, MD, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center Boston Children’s Hospital, found diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal–either low-glycemic index or very-low carbohydrate-may be preferable to a low-fat diet for those trying to achieve lasting weight loss. Furthermore, the study found that the low-glycemic index diet had similar metabolic benefits to the very low-carb diet without negative effects of stress and inflammation as seen by participants consuming the very low-carb diet.

Weight re-gain is often attributed to a decline in motivation or adherence to diet and exercise, but biology also plays an important role. After weight loss, the rate at which people burn calories (known as energy expenditure) decreases, reflecting slower metabolism. Lower energy expenditure adds to the difficulty of weight maintenance and helps explain why people tend to re-gain lost weight.

The study suggests that a low-glycemic load diet is more effective than conventional approaches at burning calories (and keeping energy expenditure) at a higher rate after weight loss.

“We’ve found that, contrary to nutritional dogma, all calories are not created equal,” says Ludwig, also director of the Optimal Weight for Life Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Total calories burned plummeted by 300 calories on the low fat diet compared to the low carbohydrate diet, which would equal the number of calories typically burned in an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity,” he says. 

Though a low-fat diet is traditionally recommended by the U.S. Government and Heart Association, it caused the greatest decrease in energy expenditure, an unhealthy lipid pattern and insulin resistance.

“In addition to the benefits noted in this study, we believe that low-glycemic-index diets are easier to stick to on a day-to-day basis, compared to low-carb and low-fat diets, which many people find limiting,” says Ebbeling. “Unlike low-fat and very- low carbohydrate diets, a low-glycemic-index diet doesn’t eliminate entire classes of food, likely making it easier to follow and more sustainable.”

Some Governments Are Making a U-Turn

Faced with mounting evidence, Swedish dietary experts recently made a dramatic U-turn, recommending a low-carb, rather than low-fat, diet for weight loss.

The bombshell came from the Council on Health Technology Assessment, which advises the Swedish government. Based on a review of 16,000 studies, it said the best sorts of food for losing weight were high fat foods which could include anything oils like olive and coconut.

So the rules are being rewritten: to lose weight, cut down on carbs and eat more fat.

So what, precisely, is behind this new thinking? It comes down to the effect different foods have on your hormones.

The most important of these hormones, and the one that’s crucial for weight loss, is insulin.

Insulin is the hormone that controls fat storage. A high-carb diet increases the amount of glucose in the bloodstream, which in turn means you produce more insulin. The more insulin the body produces, the more fat gets stored. When the body is exposed to a high-carb low-fat meal, the pancreas works hard at overshooting the secretion of insulin which then causes the excess to be stored as fat. A low-carb and high-fat diet means less insulin, making it easier to lose weight because less fat is then stored.

More Calories But More Weight Loss

Dramatic new evidence for this has come from a unique experiment conducted by a personal trainer. As Sam Feltham explains: ‘My business is helping people to lose weight, and if all calories aren’t equal, that could make a real difference.’

A few months ago, Sam upped his intake to a massive 5,000 calories every day. For three weeks he got these calories from a low-fat, high-carb diet; for another three, he ate more fat and cut right back on carbs.

He did exactly the same, moderate exercise regimen each time.

Now, according to the conventional wisdom, the weight gain would be the same on both regimens. After all, a calorie is just a calorie.

In fact, on the low-fat diet Sam stacked on 16lbs around his waist.

But when he ate more fat and cut his carbs, he added just 2.5bs and lost 1in (2.5cm) from his waistline.

‘I’m sure I eat more calories than I burn, yet my weight and waist measurement normally remain the same.’

Sam, who survived childhood cancer (Hodgkin’s lymphoma), wondered if his usual low-carb diet was the key, and set about his experiment to find out.

For the low-carb, high-fat part of the experiment, Sam got his 5,000 calories from foods such as eggs, mackerel (which is very fatty), steak, green veg and coconut oil, interspersed with three snacks of nuts – walnuts, pecans or almonds (which are naturally high in fat).

While 72 percent of his total calorie intake came from fats, 22 percent came from protein and just 5.9 percent from carbs. Each meal was exactly the same every day.

With the high-carb diet, most of his calories (63 percent) came from carbohydrates, 13 percent from protein, and 22 percent from fat.

He ate garlic bread, low-fat lasagna, crumpets, low-fat yogurts and rice pudding, chocolate muffins and wholewheat bread.

Admittedly the types of fat on his high-fat diet weren’t your usual fatty foods, such as cream and butter. And his high-carb diet wasn’t exactly ‘healthy’.

But the point was not comparing the health benefits of the two, says Sam. ‘It was an experiment to test the idea that different foods affect your body’s biochemistry differently. ‘If it is true that cutting calories is the key to weight loss, then excess calories should put on the same amount of weight whether they come from a “healthy” diet full of fat or a poor diet full of carbs.’

He says he was ‘really surprised’ at how little weight he put on with the low-carb/high-fat diet, while on the high-carb/low-fat diet his body fat increased from 12.7 percent of his body weight to 16.9 percent.

Degrading Health On Low-Fat High Carb Diets

While Sam’s experiment was by no means a scientific one, as well as the weight gain, what was even more striking was what an unhealthy effect the high carbohydrate regimen had on standard markers for heart health.

For when Sam had his blood tested after his three weeks on high carbs, ‘the diet effectively gave him metabolic syndrome which is a precursor to heart disease and diabetes.

Particularly worrying was that his triglycerides (fats in his blood) had gone up four times, while his so-called ‘good’ (HDL) cholesterol had dropped.

What’s more, a level of inflammation in his liver had doubled, which is also linked with diabetes and heart disease. “If someone came into my clinic in that state, I’d make it clear they needed to make some serious changes to their diet and start eating a diet low in carbs. I was really surprised that the damaging changes had happened so quickly,” stated Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Did the fact that, as a personal trainer, Sam was obviously very fit at the start of his trial make a difference?

“Absolutely,” says Dr Malhotra. “It is alarming to think that if a high-carb diet can have that effect on him in three weeks, what is it doing to people who don’t exercise and eat like that for years?” 

Standard Dietary Advice is Wrong!

“This is a vivid illustration of the fact that the conventional idea of what causes weight gain is back to front,” says Dr Malhotra. “We’ve been told for years that eating fat will make you fat because it contains twice the calories that are in carbohydrates. That is to misunderstand how fat storage works.”

Research has already shown that if you are eating a high-carb diet, and so have high levels of insulin, you are likely to have more fat in your blood than someone on a high-fat diet.

“This is what happened to Sam.”

Fat Does Not Clog Up Arteries

But doesn’t eating extra fat clog up your arteries? No, insists Dr Malhotra. In fact, he says, it’s too many carbs that are the problem.

He argues that – as seen with Sam – a high-carb diet tends to lower the good HDL cholesterol that helps keep arteries clear.

At the same time, as glucose from carbs is turned into fat for storage in the body, fatty acids are also produced.

It is this combination of fatty acids and low HDL, not saturated fat, that “clogs your arteries,” says Dr Malhotra.

Recent research supports the idea that warning about saturated fat in the diet has probably been a mistake.

“The influence of dietary fats on serum cholesterol has been overstated,” say the authors of a review in Advances In Nutrition in May. “The lack of any clear evidence that high-fat foods lead to adverse health effects makes one wonder how they got such a bad name.”

Demonizing fat and encouraging people to eat more carbs can be harmful to people with heart disease, says Dr Malhotra. “I see patients who have had a heart attack and are trying to lose weight on a low-fat diet and are puzzled because they are gaining weight.”

“When I investigate, it is usually because they are eating lots of low-fat supermarket foods which are also high in carbs such as sugar.” 

“When I get them eating real foods and not worrying about fat, their weight starts to come down.”

Those eating low-carb these days are much more flexible about the amount of fat they get. Research is still needed to sort out the best ratio of carbs to fat.

Western governments have yet to acknowledge the Swedish style U-turn in healthy eating advice. I’ve personally been on many of these public policy and procurement programs investing hundreds of hours of my time trying to convince officials that food pyramids have to be thrown out the window along with many recommended foods they hold praise to. As soon as these recommendations are forwarded to the highest levels, they are dismissed.

We are spending billions trying to cope with metabolic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and obesity and the emphasis on low-fat diets is only promoting the metabolic pathways which encourage these diseases.

The bottom line is to commit to educating yourself on the healthiest nutritional strategies for your health and not follow any recommendations by government, unless perhaps if you live in Sweden.

Read the full article here: http://preventdisease.com/news/13/101713_Why-Low-Fat-Diets-Make-You-Fat.shtml

Natasha Longo has a master’s degree in nutrition and is a certified fitness and nutritional counselor. She has consulted on public health policy and procurement in Canada, Australia, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany.

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What REALLY Causes Heart Disease
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