be eaten on a daily basis, but the United States, and not France, is the country
with higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
The results of the research are clear: eating fat does not make you fat. Rather,
it’s a lack of natural fats in your diet that makes you gain weight. This is
information that the public desperately needs. Natural fats are essential for your
cells to work properly. Fats slow down the absorption of food, stabilize blood
sugar levels, decrease cravings, and make you feel full. Don’t wait for the
medical establishment to change its views about low-fat diets, because it’s your
health I’m talking about. Take action now and put natural fats back into your
diet. You will eat less, lose weight, and feel more satisfied because fats balance
insulin, your natural hunger hormone.
The Effect of Low-Fat Diets on Insulin
One reason that low-fat/highcarb diets have failed us is that excess carbs quickly
turn into sugar in the bloodstream. Sugar has no redeeming health benefit,
wreaks havoc on the body’s metabolic systems, and it’s all down the
supermarket aisle in low-fat or fatfree products, which are highly processed and
loaded with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. It’s no surprise we were all
destined to fail. On the other hand, consuming natural fats will make you feel
full and satisfied.
Low-fat diets have failed us because when these diets came into vogue,
scientists didn’t fully understand the role insulin plays in general health
maintenance. Insulin is one of the ten hormones that the Perfect 10 Diet helps
balance. Insulin is the fatstoring hormone secreted whenever our bodies are
called upon to metabolize food, and it’s secreted in higher amounts when the
food you consume contains sugar or your diet is high in bad carbs (Fig. 1.1).
When you follow a low-fat diet, your pancreas will work overtime to secrete
more and more insulin in order to deal with all that excess sugar. Why? Because
sugar is damaging to your tissues, so your body must deal with it right away to
expel it from your bloodstream. As your pancreas secretes massive amounts of
insulin—more than you need—to store the sugars, your body forms
triglycerides, or fat molecules, and you gain weight. When triglyceride levels
rise, your risk for heart disease rises right along with them.
The low-fat diet craze was a real failure. When scientists figured out what
went wrong, they also became aware of the satiety effect of fat consumption.
You see, weight control is not only about calories, it’s about hormones. When
insulin is secreted in higher amounts, you feel hungrier, and you eat more.
Certainly you’ve noticed that you end up adding more skim milk to your coffee