Low fat food have become popular. In fact most food manufacturers now offer a range of low fat foods they market to those interested in weight loss. You can buy low fat everything, yoghurt, cakes, biscuits, you name it, they sell it. And they taste good too, real good. So good that sales are rocketing as many turn to these foods in an effort to lose weight. In fact, many such foods are now labelled specifically to entice the dieters to buy their favourite treats, fat and guilt free.
So How Do you Make a Low Fat Food?
Fat tastes real good. People love fat. Its one of the tastes people like instinctively. This gives food manufacturers of low fat foods a problem, because if they remove the fat, their foods taste like cardboard. And nobody likes eating cardboard. So if you take fat out of a food, you have to replace it with something equally tasty. Luckily for those in the business of making low fat foods, sugar is just as appealing as fat and replacing the fat with sugar retains the desirability.
Low Fat Foods: Too Good To Be True
So you take the fat out of a food and replace it with sugar. You end up with a food that is just as tasty, contains less calories, and has zero percent fat. So what’s the downside? Well, as the old saying goes, ‘if it sounds to be too good to be true, it probably is’. And low fat foods definitely fall into this category. In fact, its not so much that they are ‘too good to be true’, but more ‘so bad, you wouldn’t believe’.
Sugar is Converted To Fat
Many people eat low fat foods under the misguided impression that it is fat that makes them fat. However, this isn’t true. Fat can make you fat, but its far more likely sugar will make you fat. This is because when you eat sugar it goes to the liver for processing. Here the liver has two choices. It can either store the sugar as glycogen or convert it to fat. Guess which the liver chooses more often than not? Did you say fat? If you did give yourself a low fat bagel, you were right!
But It Gets Worse, Much Worse
If you eat some fat, your body will store it and use it for energy between meals. Fat is pretty useful in this regard and it causes no real problems for the body. Your body can deal with large intakes of fat without blinking. However, when you eat large amounts of sugar, the process of converting it to fat can overload the liver’s ability to cope. Most people don’t know that sugar is similar to alcohol in this regard. Small amounts are fine. But eat too much and the liver can’t cope. Do this day in day out, and the end result is a faulty liver.
Low Fat Foods Cause Abdominal Fat
Abdominal fat is the fat you see on your waist. It’s caused by accumulation of fat around your liver and other organs. I’ll give you one guess what causes it. Did you say sugar? If so you were right. The fat you produce from sugar is stored in and around the liver. This not only causes unsightly abdominal fat, it also damages the liver and leads to metabolic syndrome. The end result is a fatty liver, a fat belly and a sluggish metabolism that can’t process calories properly. And that means more weight gain.
Ditch The Low Fat Foods
Eating low fat foods is bad, very bad. If you have belly fat and a sluggish metabolism, the chances are you already have metabolic syndrome from eating sugar. You can’t lose weight eating low fat foods because the metabolic damage they do prevents weight loss. And once that damage is done, it’s more likely that anything you eat will end up as fat around your belly. So if you really want to lose weight, lay of the low fat sugar laden foods. Low fat is grow fat, and don’t forget it.
RdB