7 Low-Fat Diet Risks You Need to Know About!

Fats are an essential nutrient and one of the primary energy sources for the body. They also play a big role in weight management, absorbing nutrients, maintaining healthy skin and hair, regulating body temperature, supporting immune function, insulating internal organs, and hormonal balance. You can see right off the bat why there are just so many low-fat diet risks to be aware of!

While a balanced diet that includes plenty of plant foods, like vegetables and some fruit, is key for long-term health, fats are actually needed to properly absorb the fat-soluble vitamins found in many plants — including vitamin A, D, E and K. Fats also make us feel satisfied after eating — which is not just a nice perk that should be overlooked.

Most healthy sources of fat are also ultimate fat-burning foods. Their ability to make our food taste good, turn off hunger and stop overeating has a lot to do with weight management.

Why We Need Fats

Fats in general have gotten a bad rap in our heart-healthy and fat-obsessed diet culture. For decades, we’ve been told to put fatty foods like coconuts, eggs, fatty cuts of meat and full-fat dairy in the “foods to avoid” category. Since the American government’s 1980 Dietary Guidelines were established over 40 years ago, dietary policy has focused on reducing total fat in the American diet to no more than 30% of a person’s daily calories. This has, over the years, muscled its unnecessary influence across the world (termed as part of a Western style diet) which was subsequently upheld by the global food industry. Moreover, many of the most popular “diet plans” over the years have reduced fat to much lower levels than this.

Although we hear much more about healthy fats in the mainstream media today, anything high-fat still sets off alarm bells for most of us and raises concerns about packing on the pounds. Low-fat, diet and light products of all sorts continue to pack grocery store shelves — but what are the real risks of consuming these foods over the full-fat varieties?

Not all fats are created equally and not all affect the body in the same way. While processed and refined fats found in boxed foods and most restaurant fare can be harmful, other types of natural fats have beneficial, life-extending properties. When we miss out on fats in our diets, we can quickly find ourselves feeling tired, moody, constantly hungry, unable to kick cravings and resentful over our restrictive diets.

Some of the biggest arguments for including more fat in your diet boil down to fat’s ability to help control hormones, especially insulin. Low-fat diet risks include hormone imbalances and insulin resistance commonly linked to diabetes, weight gain, gut problems, cognitive disorders and more.

Basically, you can think of it this way: In place of fat, most people eat more carbohydrates. This also includes high-carb foods with plenty of sugar. Carbohydrates, including whole grains, have been positioned as the foundation of a healthy diet for decades, but in reality, they’re highly over-consumed today, contributing to a host of diseases.

Risks of not having enough health fat in your diet include:

1. Poor Brain Function

The brain is largely made up of fat and requires a steady stream of fatty acids to perform optimally. There seems to especially be a special protective factor when it comes to cholesterol and the brain. Cholesterol has an important role as a critical brain nutrient, so despite what most people think, low cholesterol levels can be worse than high. The brain basically requires a high amount of cholesterol as a source of fuel or energy, it’s so important that the brain even produces its own cholesterol.

Research has proven that people on a low-fat diet run the risk of encouraging poor job performance, low energy, changes in your mood, “brain fog” and so on. This is why some of the best brain foods to boost focus and memory actually have high levels of healthy fats.

2. Compromised Heart Health

While we’ve been led to believe the opposite for many years, research continues to confirm that heart disease (including coronary artery disease, the leading cause of heart attacks) likely has much more do with inflammation — which is at the root of most diseases — than from high fat or cholesterol intake.

This means that an inflammatory diet including lots of sugar, refined carbs, low-quality proteins and processed vegetable oils is actually more threatening to your heart that a diet high in fat — even saturated fat. It’s much more beneficial for your heart to eat anti-inflammatory foods that contain healthy fats. Beneficial effects include reducing blood pressure, improving insulin sensitivity and regulating glucose levels.

Think about it this way: The glorified Mediterranean-style diet that is high in fats from extra-virgin olive oil, nuts and fish exceeds over 40% of calories coming from fat. This is well above the government’s recommendation for daily fat intake. And yes the Mediterranean diet has been shown to significantly reduce cardiovascular disease, diabetes and long-term weight gain.

But what about saturated fat intake and heart disease? Here’s the truth about saturated fat: If you’re worried about saturated fat causing heart attacks, strokes and heart disease, know that evidence that saturated fat leads to heart disease is weak at best.

Some studies do show that increased saturated-fat intake can raise cholesterol levels, but there hasn’t been a strong relationship between cholesterol levels and heart disease proven. Some studies on low-carbohydrate diets, which usually have higher levels of saturated fats actually, suggest that they don’t raise blood cholesterol and can even be beneficial on cardiovascular disease risk markers like triglyceride levels.

3. Hormone Imbalances (Including Sex Hormones Testosterone and Estrogen)

Eating enough fats is one of the most important things you can do to balance hormones naturally. Cholesterol and other fats play a fundamental part in building cellular membranes (the cells skin) and hormones. Certain kinds of fats, including cholesterol, also act like antioxidants and precursors to some important brain-supporting molecules and neurotransmitters.

These include vitamin D (which actually acts more like a hormone in the body more so than a vitamin) along with other hormones like testosterone and oestrogen. Some studies in fact have found that low-fat diets raise the risk of menstrual problems and difficulty getting pregnant.

4. Weight Gain and Overeating

Look at any of the recent research involving weight gain (or loss) and fat intake, and you’ll quickly realise the established relationship between fat intake, your hormones and weight fluctuations. We know that many people who go on “diets” tend to gain back all of the weight shortly after. Why does this happen?

One explanation is that the body combats weight loss that results in a decline in energy expenditure and/or an increase in hunger, both of which promote weight regain. But certain studies have found that a higher-fat diet with lower carbs can help prevent this from happening. On top on that, most people find that diets higher in fat are more filling and turn off hunger signals much more so than lower-fat diets do.

5. Higher Risk of Insulin Resistance and Diabetes

Clinical studies have shown us that excess weight gain and insulin (or blood sugar control) are highly connected, but we know that eating plenty of healthy fats is one of the keys to controlling insulin. Insulin is sometimes called our “fat-storing hormone.” It helps usher glucose into our cells, which lowers our blood sugar levels after a carbohydrate or sugar-containing meal.

It appears that different types of fat have different effects on insulin action. Given the importance of insulin resistance in the development of diabetes and heart disease, establishing appropriate levels of fat in the diet is an important clinical goal for lowering the “diabesity” epidemic. Studies that have examined the effects of various diets with different levels of fat are revealing in telling us that lower-fat, higher-carb diets might pose a higher risk for insulin resistance (and weight gain), although there’s still some debate as to what types of fats should be most emphasised as natural diabetes cures.

Epidemiological evidence and intervention studies clearly show that monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids improve insulin sensitivity through modifications in the composition of cell membranes. Substituting saturated fat with unsaturated fat seems to have beneficial effects on insulin sensitivity, although the clinical significance of fat quality alone is still unclear. Either way, we know that diets that are higher in fat tend to be lower in carbohydrates and sugar, which is beneficial for diabetes prevention.

There’s also some evidence that suggests that insulin resistance status may affect adherence to weight loss diets. It’s possible that people with existing insulin resistance might be more likely to give up a healthy diet and therefore experience less weight loss success. This seems to be especially true for people following low-fat diets — research shows diminished weight loss success in insulin-resistant women assigned to a low-fat diets compared to those assigned to a low-carbohydrate diets.

6. Higher Risk for Depression and Anxiety

Fatty acids play an important role in higher brain functions that control moods, so eating enough healthy fat sources is one key to following an anti-depression diet. In short, higher-fat diets might lower depression and other mental disorder risks. Research now leads us to believe that use of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplements is effective in treating patients with diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

7. Gut-Related Problems

Higher-fat, high-fibre diets are now associated with a healthier gut environment, or microbiome (the collective name for our gut bacteria). A diet with plenty of naturally occurring fatty acids and nutrients supplies the building blocks needed to nourish not only a healthy gut, but also a healthy brain, both of which are very connected — also known as the brain/body connection.

A diet that keeps blood sugar balanced keeps gut bacteria balanced, too. So this means that eating plenty of high-fibre plant foods (especially all vegetables) along with healthy fats feeds the good gut bacteria in the gut and produces the right balance needed to lower inflammation. One of the benefits of coconut oil is it can be especially protective over gut health and very easy to digest even for those with chronic digestive issues.

Extracts taken from Jillian Levy, CHHC from https://draxe.com