Why We Were Wrong About Health
This is the story of how we came to be afraid of fat and cholesterol and Why the anti-fat mindset has made a lot of people’s health worse.
Video by What I’ve Learned
Key Takeaways
We’ve been programmed to associate fat with artery clogging. Our body prefers the energy dense fat and this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol needs to be reduced at all costs became medical dogma. Not only does our body want fat, it doesn’t want to reduce cholesterol.
Cholesterol is incredibly important: we need it for the membranes of our cells, we need it to make brain cells, we need it to make several important hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.
1. Knowing total cholesterol as well as “good” and “bad” cholesterol are virtually irrelevant to your health.
2. Reducing inflammation, and triglyceride concentration in the blood is what is actually important for avoiding heart disease.
3. The real things you need to limit are sugar and processed carbohydrates.
Rule of thumb you can use when picking out your food:
Think about how much something has been screwed with before you make the decision to eat that.