I Hope You Get Fat
For the Health of It
Thank goodness that dietary fat isn’t the boogie nutrient that it was a decade ago. As fat became the enemy and a swarm of low-fat and nonfat foods crowded grocery store shelves, something interesting happened––Americans got 30 percent bigger and mass confusion reigned. We started consuming highly processed goodies with wild abandon, unaware of or simply disregarding the fact that they have significantly more sugar and only slightly fewer calories that their original counterparts.
Fat is a wonderful source of energy and this is why our bodies are designed to store it easily. Ancestrally speaking, the goal was to have a stockpile of energy easily accessible when food was scarce. Also, when cold weather made activities like gathering roots a challenge, fat could be used as insulation.
Given that we now reside in a food-on-demand culture, we don’t experience the natural cycle of scarcity that allows us to burn excess body fat. Couple this with not achieving nearly the level of physical activity of our forebears, and we have become a society of overweight and unhealthy folks.
It’s not really difficult to understand how this explosion in our collective weight occurred. Fat is what helps us feel full and satisfied. Without it, there is no real feeling of satiation, and before we know it, we’ve eaten that whole box of SnackWells, along with about 800 calories and a host of highly processed non-nutrients. And on go the pounds.
Furthermore, we need fat to burn fat. That’s right. Fat balances blood sugar by slowing the release of carbohydrates into our system and levels the ratio of two hormones, insulin to glucagon, which is critical for giving stored fat the heave-ho.
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