Every five years, the federal government issues official dietary guidelines for Americans. Our children are taught these guidelines at school and school cafeterias are expected to follow them. The general population is expected to follow these guidelines as the way to a healthy body. Well, researchers are finally questioning what I’ve known for the past decade:
Are the national guidelines advising Americans to eat a low-fat diet actually feeding the current obesity epidemic?
Well, DUH!
According to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York are saying that the current guidelines have done a good deal of harm and actually caused obesity!
Americans are getting more and more fat every year even though they are being instructed by professionals on how to follow the government food guide.
Here is the problem.
Instead of consuming fat, we’re falling into the arms of the producers of fat free snack foods. Guess what those snack foods have a ton of?
Sugar.
Americans are replacing fat with sugar.
According to studies done over the past several years, Americans have been trimming fat from their diets but their total calorie intake has gone up. This happens because consuming a little bit of fat with every meal or snack adds to the satiety of what we are consuming. If you have toast for breakfast and put some non-fat spread on it, it will not fill you up and you’ll be hungry for a krueller by the time you get to the office. If you put real butter on that toast, you just may make it through your first meeting of the day.
These researchers are telling the government to clean up its act. They’re asking that the government have a higher standard of evidence before issuing guidelines on eating and, as somebody who has followed the food pyramid and grown fat because of it, I think that is a great idea. The U.S. government demands that drug companies do their research and check it several times over before introducing a new drug to the public. Shouldn’t the U.S. government be required to do the same thing before giving the American public bad advice that could cause (and has caused) heart disease, diabetes and death?
What do you think? Has the pyramid helped you lose weight – or gain it?
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