photo credit: zeer.com
Yes, you read that right. Next week’s mini-pledge is to avoid all low-fat, lite/light, and nonfat food products. And if my prediction is correct there are quite a few of you who need some explanation on why low-fat products are not considered to be “real food” or – yes, I am going to say it – ”healthy.” When I first learned that the whole low-fat campaign was pretty much a hoax I was absolutely shocked as well. For years I was right there on that bandwagon bingeing on everything from low-fat Snackwells cookies to fat-free flavored yogurt to low-fat ice cream. And as it turns out, according to Michael Pollan, “We’ve gotten fat on low-fat products.”
So here is next week’s pledge that officially starts on Monday:
Mini-Pledge Week 6: April 18 – April 24 – Do not eat any food products that are labeled as “low-fat,” “lite,” “light,” “reduced fat,” or “nonfat.”
Here’s a direct quote from Pollan’s book Food Rules that explains it all:
The forty-year-old campaign to create low-fat and nonfat versions of traditional foods has been a failure: We’ve gotten fat on low-fat products. Why? Because removing the fat from foods doesn’t necessarily make them nonfattening. Carbohydrates can also make you fat, and many low- and nonfat foods boost the sugars to make up for the loss of flavor … You’re better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on “lite” food products packed with sugars and salt.
Another New York Times bestselling author, Mark Bittman, agrees in his book Food Matters. He says, “The low-fat craze caused millions, maybe tens of millions, of Americans actually to gain weight, because they were reaching for ‘low-fat’ but high-calorie carbs.” And right on cue directly from Pollan’s In Defense of Food:
At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, Hold on just a minute. Are you really saying the whole low-fat deal was bogus? But my supermarket is still packed with low-fat this and no-cholesterol that! My doctor is still on me about my cholesterol and telling me to switch to low-fat everything. I was flabbergasted at the news too, because no one in charge – not in government, not in the public health community – has dared to come out and announce: Um, you know everything we’ve been telling you for the last thirty years about the links between dietary fat and heart disease? And fat and cancer? And fat and fat? Well, this just in: It now appears that none of it was true. We sincerely regret the error.
So let’s put the low-fat craze behind us and move forward by embracing the right portions of real food and real food only. No more faked low-fat products where according to Pollan, “fats in things like sour cream and yogurt [are] replaced with hydrogenated oils” and “the cream in ‘whipped cream’ and ‘coffee creamer’ [are] replaced with corn starch.” And just to be clear this pledge applies to all reduced fat products including milk. When the fat is removed from dairy products like milk some of the beneficial nutrients are lost with the fat as well. We just recently switched to whole milk ourselves, and I was honestly a little scared. I drank skim milk up until last year after all! But along with reducing our overall consumption of milk it has actually been a surprisingly smooth transition for us. And after learning the shocking truth behind what we’ve been told for so many years…I’ve never looked at another low-fat product the same again.
To take the pledge: Please leave a comment below with the number of adults and kids in your household that will participate, and also share if you will do it for one day or for the entire week. Put it in writing and make it official!
Sometimes I get so impatient with this conversation because it all seems and should be so obvious. I too had my gall bladder removed and I almost died from an infection (sepsis) due to the shock my system went through because of 40 stones. I was someone who vacillated between obsessively eating healthy foods, including vegetarian and macrobiotic diets to someone who ate anything and everything including oily chicken wings and bags of flavored potato chips,etc. And moderation was NOT on the menu! And alas it all caught up with me. So when the surgeon, who spent 6 hours cutting me open to remove a very inflamed organ, advised me to eat a low fat diet (which I had already started on my own the day I fell ill), I did not have to question his wisdom. Because, although their western version of a good diet (i.e. something resembling hospital food)is NOT what I define as healthy, I surely know that eating packaged, processed, unreal food is NOT a very smart value. Now because I not only need to protect my GI tract, but I need to lose more weight, I realize that eating “low fat” can simply entail eating less of even the healthy fats. Of course it goes without saying that I don’t eat cookies and candy and chicken wings anymore, etc. (at least not for the foreseeable future), but I also make things like my salad dressing with 9 parts balsamic to 1 part olive oil. I do stir fry’s by coating the pan with olive oil spray (organic) and use ingredients like homemade vegetable stock and amino acid to cook the rest. I drink almond milk (the unsweetened version) and I use nuts but sparingly. I juice fruits and veggies and do NOT worry about the sugar as it’s “real food and thus real sugar”. And for snacking, besides fruit and kale chips with a variety of seasonings, I make copious amounts of olive oil popped popcorn seasoned with everything from nutritional yeast to curry powder. I’m just saying, that I have to be aware of limiting the amount of fat (which without those awful binges of foods like chicken wings) is already achieving half the battle. So let me conclude by saying, for some of us, eating low fat greek yogurt seems to be an area where I can comfortably give up some of the fat calories so that I can be free to consume the olive oils and avocados and an occasional turkey burger! I’ve been feeling great without obsessing anymore!!!
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