You should be cooking with butter, drinking whole milk and ingesting real sugar. Forget EVERYTHING the diet industry, our vain friends and some dieticians might have told you. Eat food that tastes good.
If you are still reading you either agree or are furious. Hopefully you are still listening. It has always seemed curious to me that the rise of highly processed junk food and the rise of food labels, nutritionists and the diet industry are so closely connected. It is obvious that Americans have to change the way they are eating with 16 percent of all children obese, our current national diet is obviously not creating healthy people.
Why, then, are we not looking to what we ate before the obesity crisis? Why do we look to our current diet and just tweak it? We still go to McDonald’s, but now we order salads. We still drink Coca-Cola, but we just drink Diet Coke with some weird fake sugar. We talk about foods like butter, sour cream, ice cream, sugar, cheese and even BREAD as if they are some dirty secret from our past.
The truth is, most so called “health” food will not change your weight at all, and may even cause you health problems, including gaining more weight. Recent studies have shown that drinking diet sodas made with artificial sweeteners actually increases the risk of becoming overweight. This is because when the body tastes something sweet it expects to get some calories. Then when it doesn’t get any, it gets hungry and so you are more likely to go and get a snack, or another diet soda.
I think that similar things are likely to happen when people eat low-fat cheese, sour cream or yogurt. These things are not supposed to be low-fat. Something made with cream should be full of fat. If it’s not, either it does not taste good or the companies use something else to make it taste like there is fat. For yogurt this often means adding sugar, which can eventually get stored as fat anyway. If your cheese does not taste as good as real cheese you might add something else to make it taste good, or you might just try adding more cheese and end up over eating. Either way, why not just eat the good stuff the first time around?
Most people have already heard about the problems of trans-fats and the fact that margarines are hydrogenated oils, making them just as bad, if not worse for us, than the saturated fats found in butter. Even if that were not the case, the diet industry has totally vilified fat in an unfair way. Though an excess of body fat is obviously something that is harmful to our health, fats are also absolutely necessary in the functioning of our body. Ever single cell is literally covered in lipid molecules, basically fats. Trying to take all the fats out of our diet is not only impossible, it isn’t particularly good for us either.
The whole point of this column is that you should eat good food. You should eat food with all its fats, sugars and everything else right where it belongs, you just should not eat so much of it. Don’t “super size” everything you eat; in fact; you should really be minimizing. Eat good food, enjoy it and live a happy life.
