Sweden Becomes First Western Nation to Reject Low-fat Diet Dogma in Favor of Low-carb High-fat Nutrition

Sweden has become the first Western nation to develop national dietary guidelines that reject the popular low-fat diet dogma in favor of  low-carb high-fat nutrition advice.

The switch in dietary advice followed the publication of a two-year study by the independent Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment. The committee reviewed 16,000 studies published through May 31, 2013.

Swedish doctor, Andreas Eenfeldt, who runs the most popular health blog in Scandinavia (DietDoctor.com) published some of the highlights of this study in English:

Health markers will improve on a low-carbohydrate diet:

…a greater increase in HDL cholesterol (“the good cholesterol”) without having any adverse affects on LDL cholesterol (“the bad cholesterol”). This applies to both the moderate low-carbohydrate intake of less than 40 percent of the total energy intake, as well as to the stricter low-carbohydrate diet, where carbohydrate intake is less than 20 percent of the total energy intake. In addition, the stricter low-carbohydrate diet will lead to improved glucose levels for individuals with obesity and diabetes, and to marginally decreased levels of triglycerides.” (Source.)

Dr. Eenfeldt also translated an article from a local Swedish newspaper covering the committee’s findings:

Butter, olive oil, heavy cream, and bacon are not harmful foods. Quite the opposite. Fat is the best thing for those who want to lose weight. And there are no connections between a high fat intake and cardiovascular disease.

On Monday, SBU, the Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment, dropped a bombshell. After a two-year long inquiry, reviewing 16,000 studies, the report “Dietary Treatment for Obesity” upends the conventional dietary guidelines for obese or diabetic people.

For a long time, the health care system has given the public advice to avoid fat, saturated fat in particular, and calories. A low-carb diet (LCHF – Low Carb High Fat, is actually a Swedish “invention”) has been dismissed as harmful, a humbug and as being a fad diet lacking any scientific basis.

Instead, the health care system has urged diabetics to eat a lot of fruit (=sugar) and low-fat products with considerable amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners, the latter a dangerous trigger for the sugar-addicted person.

This report turns the current concepts upside down and advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, as the most effective weapon against obesity.

The expert committee consisted of ten physicians, and several of them were skeptics to low-carbohydrate diets at the beginning of the investigation. (Source.)

One of the committee members was Prof. Fredrik Nyström, from Linköping, Sweden – a long-time critic of the low-fat diet and a proponent of the benefits of saturated fat, from sources such as butter, full fat cream, and bacon. Some quotes from Prof. Nyström translated into English from Dr. Eenfeldt:

“I’ve been working with this for so long. It feels great to have this scientific report, and that the skepticism towards low-carb diets among my colleagues has disappeared during the course of the work. When all recent scientific studies are lined up the result is indisputable: our deep-seated fear of fat is completely unfounded. You don’t get fat from fatty foods, just as you don’t get atherosclerosis from calcium or turn green from green vegetables.”

Nyström has long advocated a greatly reduced intake of carbohydrate-rich foods high in sugar and starch, in order to achieve healthy levels of insulin, blood lipids and the good cholesterol. This means doing away with sugar, potatoes, pasta, rice, wheat flour, bread, and embracing olive oil, nuts, butter, full fat cream, oily fish and fattier meat cuts. “If you eat potatoes you might as well eat candy. Potatoes contain glucose units in a chain, which is converted to sugar in the GI tract. Such a diet causes blood sugar, and then the hormone insulin, to skyrocket.”

There are many mantras we have been taught to accept as truths:

“Calories are calories, no matter where they come from.”

“It’s all about the balance between calories in and calories out.”

“People are fat because they don’t move enough.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

"Of course these are not true. This kind of nonsense has people with weight problems feeling bad about themselves. As if it were all about their inferior character. For many people a greater intake of fat means that you’ll feel satiated, stay so longer, and have less of a need to eat every five minutes. On the other hand, you won’t feel satiated after drinking a Coke, or after eating almost fat free, low-fat fruit yogurt loaded with sugar. Sure, exercise is great in many ways, but what really affects weight is diet.” (Source.)

Will the USDA Now Revise Their Guidelines?

The scientific literature implicating the dangers of refined carbohydrates and the benefits of healthy fats has been around for decades now. One probable reason why this study was done in Sweden is that a lot of people were obvious already following such a diet. Currently in Sweden, it is estimated that only 14 percent of the population are obese compared with one-third in the USA.

So will the U.S. follow suit and explore revising USDA dietary guidelines? Not likely.

As the recently published article YOU the Taxpayer are Funding the Agri Business Takeover of our Food Supply points out, the USDA nutritional guidelines favor the heavily subsidized crops of wheat, soy, and corn. The political forces are just too strong in the U.S. right now to allow any dietary advice that would cut into corporate profits and their production of cheap food to dominate world food supplies.

This dietary advice of a low-carb high-fat diet has been around since the 1920s, when the ketogenic diet was developed at John Hopkins Hospital to cure epilepsy in children who did not respond to drugs. With the advent of the USDA diet guidelines, starting with the McGovern Report in the 1970s, fat was condemned and the low-fat diet advice was promoted through the healthcare system. You can see original TV coverage of this report from 1977 in this YouTube clip from The Fat Head movie:

In 2002, science journalist Gary Taubes began writing on the dangers of the high-carbohydrate diet and benefits of a high-fat diet, and his work was published in both the N.Y. Times and Time Magazine. His article title was “What If It Were All a Big Fat Lie!”

With mainstream media now covering the truth about the fallacies of the low-fat diet in the early 2000s, Dr. Atkins and his low-carb high-fat diet, which had been around for many years, gained a huge following. Various forms of the low-carb high-fat diet exist today in the U.S., but they are still considered “fringe” and “extreme.” The low-carb high-fat diet is routinely attacked by the government and medical system, even as pharmaceutical companies rush to make patented drugs that mimic the ketone effects of the diet, particularly in cancer treatment, the largest market share for pharmaceutical companies.

So, while Sweden has taken a huge step forward in following a commission who looked at over 16,000 studies and confirmed science that has been around for many years, don’t expect the U.S. government to do anything similar anytime soon. It is up to you to do your own research to understand the REAL facts about a healthy diet.

RELATED ARTICLES
Saturated Fat Heart Disease 'Myth' 10/22/13
Gary Taubes Interview with Dr. Mercola 
Robert Lustig: Sugar the Bitter Truth 
Weston A. Price Foundation: Obesity and Weight Loss
The Skinny on Fats, by Mary Enig ph.d


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Robyn O'Brien at TedXAustin on GMO's, our food supply and what we can do!

Robyn shares her personal story and how it inspired her current path as a "Real Food" evangelist. Grounded in a successful Wall Street career that was more interested in food as good business than good-for-you, this mother of four was shaken awake by the dangerous allergic reaction of one of her children to a "typical" breakfast. Her mission to unearth the cause revealed more about the food industry than she could stomach, and impelled her to share her findings with others. Informative and inspiring.

About this speaker

Robyn authored "The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It." A former Wall Street food industry analyst, Robyn brings insight, compassion and detailed analysis to her research into the impact that the global food system is having on the health of our children. She founded allergykidsfoundation.org and was named by Forbes as one of "20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter." The New York Times has passionately described her as "Food's Erin Brockovich."

http://allergykidsfoundation.org

http://twitter.com/unhealthytruth

Before we released our speaker's names, we featured a series of Speaker Teasers. Here, Robyn's:

Real food, is that too much to ask;

Big industry, I take to task;

It's time that we reclaim our plates;

from food forced into altered states.

How to Make your own Sleep Herbs

After the success of my homemade Adrenal Support herbs during the Summer, I thought it was time for another herb experiment!  I think this one may have turned out even better than the first.

What brought this on?  Well, I was just getting ready to spend another $24 on a bottle of Deep Sleep, which is a very nice herb sleep formula I've used, and decided it was time to save my dollars and try my hand at making my own sleep herbs.  I loved getting to know these herbs better, and I think it adds a very personal touch to my healing.  It's great to know that, even if the supplements weren't available anymore, I could make this for myself - very empowering.   The next step would be growing my own herbs.  Maybe next summer! 

STEP ONE: Get some herbs
Since I know which herbs work to help me sleep, it was fairly simple to make a list.  I chose herbs I have taken before, not too many, and fairly small amounts to make one jar of extract.  I spoke with my friend the Herbalist, to get a little guidance.  I keep glass spaghetti sauce jars, and for this project, I cleaned one out really well and ran it through the dishwasher to use to put this formula in.  I bought my herbs at the Herb Room, which is our best local herb place - open until midnight, if you can believe it!  Yes, Santa Cruz is that kind of town.  If I couldn't buy them locally, I would probably order them from somewhere like Mountain Rose Herbs.

I bought the following:

• CALIFORNIA POPPY, 1 ounce
• PASSION FLOWER, 3/4 ounce
• VALERIAN, 1/2 ounce

I had planned on also putting some other herbs in it - Milky Oats and Lemon Balm, but they were out of these, so I forged ahead without them.  I thought about adding Chamomile, too, but my herbalist friend informed me that Chamomile gets very bitter made into this kind of extract, so I didn't.  I thought about taking this in Chamomile tea, but it works great without it.

STEP TWO: Get some alcohol
I used brandy again.  Worked very well.  Still got more left for my next one!

STEP THREE: Sterilize a Glass Jar
Spaghetti sauce jar and top, very clean.

STEP FOUR:  Measure out the Herbs.  Then measure out the alcohol - 1 to 2 times as much as the herbs by volume.
The strength of herbal extractions is measured in parts herb to parts alcohol, and it's not by weight, it's by VOLUME.  Put your dry herbs all together in a glass measuring cup and see what line they come up to on the cup.  Now pour that same volume of vodka or brandy into another glass measuring cup.  That's how much you would need for a 1:1 extract.   The more herbs compared to the amount of alcohol, the stronger the extract.  You will see lots of 1:1 or 2:1 extracts on the market.  1:1 is very strong.  2:1 is less strong, but still very good.  I added about one and a half times as much alcohol as the herbs, to make a 3:2 extract - get it, 3 parts alcohol, to 2 parts herbs, right?  My decision was kind of a compromise.  With a 1:1, it's sometimes kind of hard to get all the herbs saturated because there's so little alcohol, and my jar wasn't big enough for 2:1.

STEP FIVE: Put your herbs in the jar.  Add the alcohol.  Get it all wet.  Shake it up.  Label it well
Mix the herbs together, then put them in the jar.  Pour in the alcohol.  Take a clean stainless steel spoon and stir it around to get all the herbs wet.  Don't rush  - this will take a few minutes.  Wet down any little pockets of dry herbs remaining.  Put the lid on tight.  Label it carefully with exactly what's in it and the date.  Shake it up for around 10 minutes, at least 200 times, all around, upside down, until it looks super wet and saturated.

Don't forget to label your jar.  Write on it the name, the concentration, the date, when it will be ready, and what's in it.  One reason this is important is because the next time you want to make it, you will have forgotten what you used, I guarantee it!   Also it's nice to know at a glance if it's ready to use  And if you don't like how it turns out, you'll know what NOT to do next time!

STEP SIX: Put it in a dark cupboard for TWO WEEKS.  Shake it every few days.
Keep it in a dark place at all times.  Your extract will take a full fourteen days to be ready.  You will want to give it about 50 shakes every 2-3 days.  No big deal - Just slosh it around, up and down, upside down, and put it back in the cupboard.

SEVEN: Strain it sweeten it (optional), and USE it!
After two weeks, you can strain all or part of your extract.  It is ready to use.  I strained a couple ounces into an old glass dropper bottle I had, and left the rest to soak, which it is still doing.   Strain it through a coffee filter lining a strainer, into a glass container.  It will take awhile.

I did not sweeten this one - it actually tastes ok on it's own.  At first I tried adding it to chamomile tea, but didn't really want to make tea every night, and it didn't work great for me that way.  What I finally ended up doing with this is using the little dropper to squirt this into empty "00" veggie capsules, and taking it that way.  I found that for me, 1 capsule didn't get me to sleep, but 2 did the job really well!  So now I have almost a lifetime supply of sleepy support that works for me, for less than $10 in herbs and alcohol! 

You would always want to fill these capsules right before you take them.  They would probably melt after awhile, even though they don't have any water in them.  The professional capsule companies have special ways of making and sealing their liquid-filled caps that make them way more stable.








Happy herbmaking!

DISCLAIMER: Note that there's a lot to the herbmaking craft that is not included here.  It's important to extract each herb in the way that is well-suited to it, and to carefully construct your blends.  This is just an example of a good beginners blend that might be useful.  Please read up on any herb you plan to use and make sure it is appropriate for you.

5 Minute Daily Energy Medicine Routine

I just tried this and I really like it!  I've been getting into energy medicine lately, and it felt to me like this really did wake up my energy this morning, kind of like an early morning walk or workout does!  Give it a try. Takes five minutes or less!

Imagine a simple set of exercises done in minutes designed to clear and balance your energy in the traditions of energy medicine like acupuncture and acupressure--as easily as brushing your teeth in the morning.

Donna Eden, author of books such as Energy Medicine and Energy Medicine for Women, outlines this simple routine you can begin incorporating into your day.  I recommend at least doing this in the morning, but it can be done whenever you want. It is a good, overall body routine.

Below you will find a PDF instruction manual with photos and a YouTube video where Donna Eden demonstrates the routine for you.



Here's a written version  in pdf form that you can print out.