Barry Groves on Dietary Fat

kgr — 2010-07-13T09:39:31GMT-05:00

Barry Groves has an excellent talk about the importance of dietary fat. You can watch the video, and download the slides.

One thing that he explains that I always wondered about was where all of the fat comes from in a cows diet. Consider that a cow which can eat nothing but grass can produce over 100 pounds of milk a day, which at over 4% fat, is over four pounds of fat. But as far as I know, grass doesn't contain any fat. It turns out that the cow actually has the ability to turn the fiber in the grass into saturated fat. When you take this into account, a cow's diet is essentially 66% fat.

Another interesting point that he mentions is that since the U.S. government came out with their low-fat dietary recommendations in 1982, the cancer rate in the U.S. has increased from one in six to one in two.

If you want to see what has happened to U.S. obesity rates during the same time range, then have a look at these slides:

US Obesity Trends Among U.S. Adults

Or this video, which uses the same slides, but also talks about various research studies, all of which show that low-carb diets are superior for weight-loss than other diets tested. In the largest study, which tested Atkins against three other common diets, the Atkins diet had the best results, not only for weight loss, but in every category tested, which included:

body fat %
hip to weight ratio
HDL
LDL
triglycerides
cholesterol
fasting insulin and glucose levels
blood pressure

The Atkins diet also had the best compliance ratio, with only half as many subjects quitting the diet before the study was complete as with the diet based on official U.S. dietary guidelines.

Jimmy Moore has a summary of the talk.

PeerBox

Barry Groves on Dietary Fat