Fat is the pharma industry’s and your friend

Before the Americans had Osama bin Laden they were fighting another ferocious battle: fat. The reasoning was simple: if you eat too much fat, you will get fat. Easy, isn’t it? Well, not really. A few weeks ago I attended a presentation by book-writing German doctor Günter Frank. He thought that the Americans are wrong with their fight against fat, as they are wrong about the enprisonment of mates in Guantanamo. According to a meta-analysis of over 16.000 medical studies, only 27 out of those 16.000 plus hinted at a slight relation between eating fat and being fat. Medically speaking, eating fatty food doesn’t make you fat. According to Dr. Frank being fat or slim has more to do with genes and that not everyone digests food as effectively as fat people (they store the energy better than other people). Or put the other way around: thin people are thin because they digest food badly and therefore they eat more (sounds logical). And the second reason for being or getting fat is stress. If you tell children that they get fat if they eat burgers, they will start to develop eating disorders because of stress. So eating only vegetables and high fibre food might work for some persons, but not for everyone: if you are thin it makes sense to eat a burger with French fries. Dr. Frank thinks that the hunt for fat has more to do with the pharmaceutical and nutritional industry creating fear so that people buy their ‘light’ products than with nutritional science. Healthy people are bad for the health industry as they are bad clients! This is at least good news for Burger King!

You can buy Dr. Frank’s book here: http://www.amazon.de/Lizenz-zum-Essen-Gewicht-Stress/dp/3492050743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231700582&sr=8-1

Read this blog entry for more controversial nutritional information: http://easteatswest.typepad.com/east_eats_west/2008/12/eat-healthy-and-die-younger.html

Comments

[john]

Actually most Americans don't believe fat makes them fat. Despite our knowledge we continue to eat unhealthily. Many people understand that "trans-fats" can have a deleterious effect on weight loss. We also know that processed sugars, and carbohydrates in excess can cause glycogen stores to skyrocket and inflate existing adipose tissue. Admittedly most of us don't understand it quite in those terms. Fat itself can cause build ups of plaque in ateries and cause other heart related ailments as well.