Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (20 page)

This means that a whopping 54 percent of the calories in these potato chips come from nothing but waist-padding fat. Potatoes themselves are nearly fat-free, but when they are deep-fried they soak up an enormous amount of grease.

Salad dressings are another potential minefield-they can be packed with fat. Let’s say we chop up a cup of romaine lettuce and half a tomato. So far, this has only 20 calories. But if we add a tablespoon of Catalina French dressing, the dressing is 76 percent fat and has more than three times the calorie content of the salad it covered. Other dressings are as bad or worse: Good Seasons Zesty Italian is 95 percent fat: one tablespoon has 9 grams of fat and 85 calories. Even typical oil and vinegar has about 8 grams of fat and 72 calories per tablespoon.

For a better alternative, use a low-fat or no-fat dressing, now available at the grocery store, often sold in the dietetic foods section. Or sprinkle a little lemon or lime juice on your salad or vegetables. A tablespoon of lemon or lime juice has no fat and only 4 calories. Many people come to actually prefer the taste of fresh spinach, chickpeas, tomatoes, or other salad ingredients with no dressing at all.

One has to wonder why we are compelled to take perfectly innocent salads and vegetables and grease them all up. Why is it that a beautiful salad of deep green leaves with diced onion and tomato, green peppers, and chickpeas is not considered edible until spiced oil is poured on top? Why is toast always topped with butter, a bagel with cream cheese, or a potato with butter and sour cream? We add flavored grease to many otherwise healthful foods.

So far we have looked at the different ways in which carbohydrates, fat, and fiber affect the body. If you like, you can forget about terms like carbohydrate and fiber. If your diet is made from grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits rather than from animal products, it will be naturally rich in both. Only a very few plant foods-avocados, nuts, seeds, olives, and some soy products-are high in fat. Other plants have a strikingly healthful profile: very low in fat and rich in complex carbohydrates. To the extent that animal products are added to your plate, complex carbohydrates and fiber are left off. Some supposedly dietetic commercial dinners include animal products, such as meat and cheese, but the most effective weight-control menus are vegetarian. For a comparison of plant and animal products, see
Table 8
.

Researchers have put vegetarians on the scale and found, not surprisingly, that the average pure vegetarian weighs substantially less than the average meat-eater.
¹
If vegetarians also keep vegetable oil to an absolute minimum, their diet is even more powerful for weight control.

Some people who are still eating pork chops and beef instead of grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes actually add concentrated fiber, such as Metamucil or oat bran, to their foods, trying to counteract the constipation, elevated cholesterol, and other effects of the fiber-depleted foods they are eating. They may also take vitamin supplements and try to mend their diets in other ways. But these repair measures are poor substitutes for truly healthful diets, as the rest of this book demonstrates.

Because Americans grow up eating meats, dairy products, and fried foods, fat contributes about 37 percent of the calories most of us get every day. For a typical 2,000-calorie menu, that is 740 calories each day just from fat.

A menu of grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits naturally contains only
about 10 percent fat. That means that a huge number of calories have been eliminated from your diet. Let me give you a couple of figures. Over the course of a year, a standard American diet holds 270,000 calories of pure fat. A 10 percent fat diet based on grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes cuts that figure to 73,000. Now, you can make up for some of that difference by eating other foods. But when the menu is naturally low in fat, a person can eat much larger portions without gaining weight.

When Dr. Dean Ornish puts patients on a low-fat vegetarian diet, along with an exercise program and other life-style modifications, his target is their heart problems. But these patients also lose a lot of weight. In fact, the average patient loses more than twenty pounds in the first year. “One patient lost almost a hundred pounds during the course of a year,” Ornish said. They were not necessarily trying to lose weight. Dr. Ornish did not restrict the amount of food his patients ate. They could eat anytime they wanted and as much as they wanted, and they still lost weight.

“It’s a different concept of dieting than most people are used to. In most diets, you still eat the same types of food, but you restrict the amount. So you’re eating maybe a 30 percent fat or 40 percent fat diet, but you restrict the portion sizes, and people generally go around feeling pretty hungry. Sooner or later people get tired of feeling hungry. They go off the diet, they often gain most of the weight back, and then they feel even worse.”

Dr. Ornish’s program is just the opposite. “This is a diet based more on the type of food than on the amount of food. Within these guidelines, a person can eat whenever he or she is hungry. They often eat more frequently than before, and often even eat larger portion sizes than they did before. And yet, because the diet is so low in fat, they often lose weight.”

An average weight loss of more than twenty pounds, with no calorie restriction, may be surprising to many people, but it is not unusual with low-fat vegetarian menus.

“They don’t just keep losing,” Dr. Ornish said. “They come down to something approaching their ideal body weight, and then they stabilize.”

Similarly, international comparisons have shown that people who eat very low fat foods can eat more while staying slimmer. In detailed studies of sixty-five Chinese provinces, Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University found that the Chinese diet helps people stay slim. Is that because they are starving? Hardly. They actually eat more than Americans do.

“The quantity is actually greater than what we tend to consume in this
country,” Dr. Campbell said. “They consume a lot of rice, of course, enormous amounts of rice and some other grains. The total amount of food they consume is actually greater than what it is here.”

Again, it’s not
how much
you eat, it’s
what
you eat. The grains and vegetables that make up the Chinese diet give it little fat and generous amounts of complex carbohydrates.

“On average, the fat intake as we measured it is 15 percent of calories, which is quite substantially below what we have in this country,” Campbell said. Typical fat consumption in China ranges between 6 and 24 percent of calories.

When I was growing up, American parents tried to cajole their children into eating their dinner with images of “all the starving people in China.” Well, the Chinese actually eat more than we do. And because their diets are so high in plant foods and low in fat, they stay slim while we go to Weight Watchers. The Chinese are also more physically active, which we will discuss shortly.

Once people are used to fatty foods, they tend to crave them, unfortunately. It seems that we have a “set-point” for fat. We get used to having a certain amount of fat in foods. If we get too much, we do not like it, and if we have less, we feel deprived. If we are used to butter on our potato, it seems bland without it. If we are used to having toast that drips with butter, we miss it when it’s gone.

What I have found, however, is that these set-points are easy to change. For example, if you were to have a salad with no dressing at all, it would seem a little strange at first, but within just a few times of trying it this way, you would come to prefer it. Having set this new habit, you will find it strange to have salad oil added.

You can try the same sort of test with popcorn. If you are used to having butter on your popcorn, the first time you have it without butter it will taste bland. But if you have it several times without butter, you will become accustomed to the lighter taste, and buttered popcorn will then taste greasy.

For most people, the process of adjustment takes a few weeks. At the beginning, you may wake up in the night screaming for lard-covered doughnuts and chocolate fish sticks. But before long you’ll reset your taste for fat to a new lower level. You will wonder how Americans can stand all the grease they consume and why they resign themselves to the health problems that are its predictable result. But don’t tease yourself. I find that it is easier
to cut out meats, chicken, fish, and fried foods
entirely
, and to set a new habit that leaves them out, than to tease yourself with occasional greasy foods. Many people experience such extraordinary health benefits from this dietary change that they never want to go back to greasy foods, even if they were not fattening.

Of course, we do need some fat in the diet. A healthful menu of grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, with only rare use of additional oils, will derive about 10 percent of its calories from fat. Even this is more than the body needs. Some doctors hold that children can (and perhaps should) have a bit more fat in their diet than is recommended for adults. It is risky to go too far with this, however. By the age of four or five, children get hooked on chicken nuggets and all the other greasy foods that spell obesity, cancer, and heart disease a few decades later. Ten to 15 percent of calories from fat is more than enough at any age, and at higher levels health problems are more likely.

There is no doubt which menu is the most powerful for cutting the fat: vegetarian foods are free of the animal fat that permeates meats, poultry, and fish. Staying away from fried foods and added oils is the other half of the food prescription. Although this sounds like a big change (and it is), there is a world of healthful foods waiting to fill the bill. Pasta dishes like linguine with a light basil sauce or spaghetti with tomato sauce, vegetable curries, bean burritos, and other vegetable entrees are ready to help you burn off the pounds.

Manufacturers are starting to push products that gratify the taste for fat without adding calories. The NutraSweet Company has launched Simplesse, which actually is a protein that simulates the texture of fat on the tongue. Simplesse cannot be used in baked or fried foods, however, because its consistency changes when heated. Procter and Gamble has developed Olestra, an indigestible and unabsorbable sucrose polyester designed to taste like fat. Is it safer than other chemical additives? This is still a matter of vigorous dispute, as some contend that Olestra may cause cancer and liver problems.