In the late 1970’s the fear of fat gripped the western world. The rate of heart disease was on the increase and the US government 
decided that something had to be done about it. In 1977 the new dietary guidelines came out vilifying fat and telling everyone to eat more cereals and grains and stop eating fat. They determined that the reason we are all getting heart disease and getting fatter was because of the large amounts of fat we used to eat. So, we stopped eating fat. A huge amount of ‘low fat’ products flooded onto our supermarket shelves and we changed to these. The problem however is when you take fat out of food it tastes terrible, and no one would buy it. So food manufacturers had to fill the fat ‘hole’ with something to make it taste better. What do you think they added? Yes, sugar ( and salt to balance out the sweetness from the huge amounts of sugar added ). The other problem is foods that are high in carbohydrates and low in fat are not very filling. Fat is a very satisfying macronutrient and it actually tells the body, through the release of a hormone called Leptin when it’s full. However carbohydrates don’t give most of us the same message and instead we continue to eat much more than we should.
Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) where did this come from?
The real question that we should be asking is, what were we designed to eat?
Humans evolved over millions of years as hunter-gatherers. Our diet was made up of meat and fish and a small amount of vegetation what we were able to gather. These carbohydrates where nothing like the high starch foods that we eat today eg. bread, pasta, potatoes, kumara etc.
It was only 12,000 years ago with the development of agriculture by the ancient Egyptians that these starch rich foods were introduced into our diets. Many of you may think, well that’s a long time ago and so what’s wrong with that? Well, 12,000 years is actually a very short period of time in our human evolution. For millions of years we ate as hunter-gatherers and our bodies are not able to change that dramatically in such a short period of our history. Then 100-200 years ago was the introduction of the Industrial Revolution, with this came factories with the ability to produce large amounts of refined sugar and white flour. We definitely have not had a chance to adapt to these types of processed foods.
Interestingly there have been studies done on the ancient Egyptians, through excavation of the mummies, and their findings are not comforting. These Egyptians lived on a very high carbohydrate diet and ate very little meat and fat. It has been found that the Egyptians, for the first time in humans history, were overweight, and showed signs of heart disease, high blood pressure, organ damage and terribly decayed teeth. This is the first time our ‘modern day’ diseases have surfaced over our millions of years of evolution. Is this a coincidence?
