Sugar vs Fat - Which Is Better?

Which is worse for you sugar or fat? Coming right up

Hey this is Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master

health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and

hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything I saw a video about

fat versus sugar on the size show channel recently and they did a great

job it's an awesome channel that does a lot of research on various topics and

then they give you the pros and cons and this was a very well researched video I

enjoyed it tremendously however I did feel that they left the viewer hanging a

little bit so I'd like to clarify a few points that I feel I know a little bit

extra about so fat has been demonized ever since about 1953 and there was one

man more involved than just about anyone else

and his name was Ancel Keys and he got this idea that fat was a really bad idea

and he brought out something called the Seven Country Studies and in this he looked

at countries that ate a lot of fat and he found a great correlation to how much

heart disease that was however he failed to mention that there was actually data

from 22 countries so Ancel Keys just cherry picked the countries that suited

his opinion and when people went back later and looked at all 22 countries

there was no correlation whatsoever as a matter of fact two countries namely

Switzerland and the Netherlands had even more fat consumption than one of the

countries that was cited in the study Finland but Switzerland and Netherlands

ate more fat than Finland and they had one third of the heart disease so there

was a lot of countries involved but mr. keys just picked the ones

suited his purposes another study was about cholesterol and there was always a

question whether dietary cholesterol was a factor in blood cholesterol and

cholesterol buildup so one study that they really liked back then was from

Russia where they had fed rabbits diet high in cholesterol and then upon

dissection later on they found that the rabbits had indeed cholesterol buildup

in their arteries that looked a lot like heart disease but they've never been

able to duplicate that in any other species and they seem to overlook the

fact that rabbits in nature have a zero cholesterol diet they are herbivores

they eat plants only so of course if you feed an herbivore a diet high in

cholesterol it's not the innate species food for them any animal that you feed

something including humans that doesn't belong for that species you're gonna

create disease and if you'd like to know more about those topics about heart

disease and cholesterol this is a great book highly recommended it's called The

Great Cholesterol Myth by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra another thing about

research that we need to be aware of research is great I'm all for forwarding

science and knowledge but we have to keep in mind that people who perform the

research have a bias they generally have something that they like to prove and

the other side of the coin is that someone has to pay for the research and

whoever pays for the research isn't interested in finding out things that

they don't want to know another great book to learn more is called undoctored

by William Davis he previously wrote wheat belly and he spent over 20 years

in the medical field as a cardiologist so he knows the ins and outs and he

shares a lot of that and he mentions about research that for example

in the area of antidepressants that 37 out of 38 trials that were positive that

produced the results that they wanted to find were indeed published but there

were also 36 studies that had negative results they didn't find out they they

found the opposite of what they wanted and 33 out of 36 of those studies were

not published so basically virtually every time that they find a study that

has the results they're looking for they publish it and most of the time that

they don't find what they're looking for they don't publish it so how do we know

what the research actually shows so first of all researchers have a bias

they have an interest they have an expectation of what they're going to

find and then in addition to that they also have to ask themselves if I find

the opposite if it finds negative implications of this then who's gonna

pay for my next study so researchers probably want to be idealistic but they

also have to be realistic and and keep their job so coming back to sugar versus

fat which one is worse we have to understand a couple of things about

sugar and when people talk about sugar they usually talk about the white

crystallized stuff that you can buy in a package or that is added to processed

foods but sugar or carbohydrates is anything that causes an insulin response

so a slice of toast or a potato or french fries or corn produces about as

much of an insulin response as sugar and it's the insulin response that we don't

want that's the damaging part about the sugar

there are other problems with sugar being empty calories and depleting

minerals and being inflammatory and and so forth but the main thing we want to

avoid is the insulin response so when it comes to

we are mostly concerned about the quantity so if you keep it carbohydrates

low enough they're not gonna mess with you too much when it comes to fat

however it's not that sugar is bad and fat is good or vice versa

we also have to look at the quality so it turns out that when it comes to sugar

it's mostly about quantity when it comes to fat it's mostly about quality so fat

has been the preferred fuel for humans for thousands of years tens of thousands

hundreds of thousands it's been the fuel source and the food source that has been

the most stable and most readily available across all seasons that

carbohydrates haven't been available to humans throughout the year but fat

typically has and fat was much easier to store so fat is the preferred fuel for

humans that's what our physiology is adapted to but it's very very important

and we look at the quality for all those tens and hundreds of thousands of years

that humans have been eating fat they have been eating fat exactly in the form

that nature provided it they have been eating animal fats and fish fats and nut

fats and so forth and today the healthy fats that we can eat has nothing to do

with whether it's saturated or unsaturated it has to do with has it

been altered so butter is a good fat extra virgin olive oil is a good fat

coconut oil is a good fat and all natural fats from healthy food from

avocados from clean nuts from clean animals animals that have been raised in

their natural habitat eating what they're supposed to eat like a cow is

supposed to eat grass if a cow eats grass the fat from the cow is healthy if

we feed him grain the fat from the cow is unhealthy so it's not that fat is

good or bad it is the quality of the fat as long as we eat natural fat that

humans haven't altered then we're in good shape some of the worst fats

obviously are all the fats that we have been sold the idea of in the last 50

years margarine vegetable oils that are

actually seed oils because they're so highly processed so damaged so heated

and bleached and deodorized that there is absolutely no nutrition in there so

is sugar or fat worse well I would have to say that sugar is by far worse

because there is nothing really good about it

there are carbohydrates from vegetables that you can eat almost unlimited and

carbs in their natural form in very low quantity not moderation according to

most people's standards low carb is what we're looking for and fat we can eat

just about as much as we like as long as we eat natural fats and in between there

we want to have a moderate amount of protein as well so we want to be careful

with just looking at research and quoting research for the reasons I

mentioned previously what we really want to do is we want to look at we want to

use common sense we want to look at historically how have humans evolved how

does human physiology function and there's great physiology textbooks and

when we combine the historical research with the physiology textbooks and

clinical results then we have the better package then we do research to further

our knowledge but we don't depend on the research we use it to enhance our

understanding so historical facts physiology and clinical results that's

the way that we understand more about how

the body really works and what we are supposed to eat as humans thanks for

watching