5 Reasons that Fats Make Us Fat

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#5. Higher in Calories

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At 9 calories per gram, it has more than double the calories of a gram of protein (4 calories per gram) or carbohydrate (3.75 calories per gram). Fat, protein and carbohydrate are the only kinds of constituents in our diet (apart from alcohol, which contains 7 calories per gram) that give us calories. All the other things we eat and drink (water, vitamins, minerals, fibre, micro-nutrients) contain no calories. Put simply, weight for weight, fat is higher in calories than any other food.

#4. East to Convert

The body likes to convert fat in our food into fat on ourselves. All the latest research shows that spare fat in your diet – i.e., that not used for your energy needs – is much more easily laid down as body fat than spare carbohydrate is. Backing up this research, an American experiment found that people who ate a high-carbohydrate but low-fat diet lost weight steadily without decreasing their overall food intake.

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#3. Hard to Stop

When you eat fat, the natural, weight-regulating body mechanisms don’t appear to work properly: Research carried out by much respected Andrew Prentice of the Medical Research Council at the Dunn Nutrition Unit in Cambridge has recently made two interesting discoveries about how our bodies react to fat when we eat it. First, he believes that, because most people’s body-fat stores are so large (over 100,000 calories’ worth of fat on an average woman’s body), when we eat fat the body doesn’t ‘notice’ and therefore doesn’t send out the normal signals of appetite being sated. Whereas if you eat carbohydrate, then because the body’s carbo stores are low- about 1,000 calories’ worth – the body quickly notices that it is being bombarded with, say, double the quantities it can store and sends up an ‘I am full’ message to the brain. His second discovery revealed that when we eat protein, carbohydrate or alcohol, our body metabolism speeds up and begins to burn off extra calories. But when we eat fat, it doesn’t.

#2. You Tend to Eat More

Fat makes other foods more palatable. When fats are mixed with other foods, as in many commercially made products or in home baking, for instance, you eat much more than you would have done if the food had consisted simply of the other ingredients. Sugar not mixed with fat is hard to eat in quantity. Think of a meringue (just sugar and egg white): how much could you eat at one sitting? But combine sugar with fat – in, say, a slice of cream cake – and you can eat much more. Fats, probably because they melt in your mouth, make it very easy to slip down hundreds of extra calories. Apply that to a baked potato. It seems to be much easier to eat with a huge knob of butter than it is on its own. Dry bread you will eat until you feel full, but spread it with butter and you will probably eat two or three times as much. Fats in and on food make us eat more.

#1. Hard to Calculate

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Fat is easy to miscalculate. On most slimming diets, dieters are requested to weigh and measure quantities but, research shows, people tend to guess, at least after the first day or two on a diet. With less dense items, such as bread or vegetables, that doesn’t matter much because a miscalculation between, say, 25 g (1 oz) and 40 g (1.5 oz) of bread means only an extra thirty or so calories. But if you miscalculate between, say, 25 g (1 oz) and 40 g (1.5 oz) of butter, you are eating an extra 105 calories! This fat miscalculation is probably another reason why dieters who think they are on a low-calorie diet don’t lose any weight.

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