Written by: The Veri Team
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3 minutes
Dietary fat doesn’t make you fat. Learn about the dietary choices that are associated with weight gain.
Fat is no longer quite as vilified as it once was. Avocado oil is trendy. Olive oil, too.
The American Heart Association now even grudgingly recognizes fat as an important part of the diet. Yet, there remains a prejudice against fat in the diet collective consciousness which affects us all, to a degree. It’s the result of our having seen thousands of ads and articles over years and decades that apotheosize fat-free foods in flashy fat-free packages, while demonizing humbler, fattier fare.
The idea that fat = fat is a programmed, unconscious bias in our society. (There was even a bona fide Sugar Industry conspiracy that helped set the stage for this in the 1960s.)[3]
Since fat has been the fall guy for other aspects of metabolic health, like heart disease, we tend to think: “Well fat’s killing us in all these other ways…it has to be making us fat, too. But those other ways were wrong in the first place.
The original studies that correlated heart disease with fat intake completely neglected the high correlation with sugar. In fact, much of the fat-bashing science from the mid 20th century has been proven to be paid for and influenced by the sugar industry.[3]
We’ve been consuming fat for far longer than we’ve eaten processed sugar. And it’s only been since recent times that our waistlines have expanded.
Though fat doesn’t make you fat as a rule, fat can make you gain weight if:
If you’re having a hard time discerning which types of fat to eat, there’s a really simple filter to pass grocery store items through before you purchase:
A) Did this fat exist before the industrial revolution?
If so, then eat up! The industry is what has corrupted food and food science, so if your fat predates modern processed foods, you’re on the right track. Some of our favorite fats are olive oil, grass-fed butter, bacon, coconut oil, and ghee.
But the best way to tell if a food is good for you is to measure how your blood sugar responds to it. While excess weight is linked to metabolic health issues, it’s not everything. So don’t stress about where you’re at. The most important thing is to adopt positive metabolic habits that can help you control your blood glucose.
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