During my trip to Costco to pick up a new rice cooker/steamer I decided to purchase a few food items while I was there. Costco has really ramped up their selection of organic and natural products, available in smaller packages. Surprisingly, after an hour of reading labels I walked out of the store with nothing more than a bag of almonds, a dozen organic apples, and my rice cooker. Why? Not because of the large quantities (after all, we are creatures of habit and I really will go through those apples in one week) but the natural and organic items they do carry are extremely high in % of calories from fat or sodium.
When it comes to packaged foods we are aiming for no more than 20% of calories from fat and a 1:1 ration on calories to mg of sodium.
Fat
I was under the understanding that 30% of calories should come from fat, 30% from protein, and 40% from carbohydrates. I was surprised to learn that this guidance from the USDA was not based recommendations or science, but rather what the USDA considered a tolerable level. A study by the World Health Organization in 1997 consulted that in order to limit incidents of obesity a maximum of 20-25% of calories should come from fat.
Why did the USDA choose to list guidance of 30%? Because they did not believe that society would accept the results (when they were currently consuming 40% of calories in the form of fat).
"The dominant policies are still those relating to cardiovascular disease developed by Geoffrey Rose and Henry Blackburn for WHO in 1984. They specified a 15–30% range in total fat intakes because the Chinese and Japanese, with negligible CHD, diabetes and obesity in the 1970s, were consuming on average 14% fat, but this was totally unrealistic for the US and Northern European populations where intakes were well over 40%. So to choose a 30% figure was radical and a response to the need to reduce saturated fat intakes by simply reducing total fat." The full report on the Epidemiology of Obesity can be found in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
What is wrong with this picture?
We have the knowledge that optimal daily fat intake is 14%-20% of total calories, the USDA recommends that 30% of calories from fat, food producers supply the population with processed foods which contain 40-70% of calories from fat, and we are all scratching our heads wondering why we have an obesity epidemic in the United States. This is insane.
Obesity
In 2006, 66% of the US population was overweight and half of those were considered obese (33% of the population). It is predicted that by 2015 75% of the population will be overweight, with 41% of total population obese.
According to the CDC, in 2008, obesity-related medical care costs were estimated to be as high as $147 billion.
Light Bulb
Regardless of which diet I settle into at the end of this experiment, one thing is incredibly clear - the improvement of health of our society (and mine) relies on 2 objectives:
- Increasing the consumption of nutrient dense foods
- Decreasing the consumption of calorie dense foods
The very next sentence of the quote above from the Journal of Internal Medicine states:
ReplyDelete"Ancel Keys’ Seven Country Study observations that fat might be related to the BMIs of his samples but not to CHD because the Greeks, on a high olive oil diet, had a low saturated fat intake at that time. The subjects also happened to be incredibly physically active: the selected shepherds in Crete were walking and climbing mountains all day long so this is hardly a realistic basis for suggesting that fat intakes do not matter."
So it's not fat in general, but a combination of sedentary life-style and saturated fat, right?