For the past 40 years fat has been labelled as the bad guy in nutrition but growing evidence is showing that natural fat whether saturated or unsaturated has no detrimental effects on the human body and is actually beneficial for health if anything. Alongside all of this it appears that sugar is some what of the bad guy when it comes to health being a real threat to human health and our future.
Recently I interviewed leading cardiologist and fellow Huffington Post blogger Dr. Aseem Malhotra to explain how sugar is killing us slowly but surely. It ended up being a 30 minute interview, which you can watch at the bottom, but if you don't quite have time to listen to that I've extracted my top five points from this insightful interview:
1. Obesity, in my view, is just a marker of a much bigger problem. The reason I say that is that obesity increases the risk of what we call the metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome, very briefly, is an amalgamation of the conditions of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, high triglycerides, but also, what we do know, is that 40% of people who suffer from the metabolic syndrome have a normal body mass index!
2. We have perhaps wrongly been demonising the wrong food constituents, saturated fats, and as a result the foods have had saturated fats removed because we believed that saturated fats was the cause of heart disease, and was replaced with sugar.
3. Any extra amounts of sugar you're consuming will increase your risk of consuming more calories anyway by the way it works on appetite.
4. One can of Coke, for example, contains 9-10 teaspoons of sugar, so a child drinking that has already gone over their limit, before they've even had anything else in their diet, and that's one of the other concerns we have. There are cereals out there that contain 20-30% sugar!
5. If we are going to tax certain foods or encourage healthier food behaviour, then we need to subsidise certain healthier foods, vegetables and fruit, and that has to be done again through government intervention.
To watch more interviews like this as well as workout videos go to www.SmashTheFat.com/live