Allioli > Fat > Obesity > Death
I hope that helps.
Doesn't help at all, other than to perpetuate a long standing myth.
At the risk of taking the thread off-topic for a minute or 2, allow me to digress...
Whilst it is true that the
per-gram calorie count of fat (9cal) versus protein (4cal) or carbohydrate (4cal) is higher, the link suggesting that fat alone causes obesity is tenuous at best.
Want evidence of this? Look at dietary habits in the early part of the 20th century. People's diets consisted of larger amounts of butter, lard and other animal fats that're taboo nowadays. In the absence of processed foods and primarily the abundance of high-fructose corn syrup that's abundant today it's reckoned that the average person in the early 1900s consumed about 20lbs of sugar per year. The occurrence of severe coronary issues and obesity was also much, much lower than it is now.
Skip forward about 70 or 80 years, where obesity is on the rise and heart disease is the number 1 killer in many countries around the world. What has happened to the diet? Have people started to consume much more dangerous amounts of fat? Not really. However, due to the abundance of processed junk food (high in sugar content and white flour) the average sugar consumption has risen to 100lbs per person per year or more!
Obesity is caused by the fact that on a high-carbohydrate diet, such as that wrongly recommended by most health authorities, the metabolism becomes used to obtaining and burning carbohydrates as a primary source of energy.
Your blood sugar spikes after you eat, an abundance of insulin is produced to counter this, you use what you can for immediate energy (converting it to glucose) but the rest is then stored as fat. Your blood sugar drops and because of this you soon feel hungry again, and reach for more high-carb food, thus perpetuating the cycle. Even when you're hungry your body is set to metabolise carbs, and thus even though you have plenty of stored fat, your body doesn't "know" how to use it.
Having high fat in a high carb diet is the worst case scenario, and thus the myth is perpetuated that it's the fat that's at fault.
By lowering your processed carb intake, switching from processed fats such as the highly touted trans-fats in margarine, etc. back to the old style fats such as cream, butter, lard you actually can eat a higher calorie diet and not gain, sometimes even lose weight. In extreme cases such as the induction phase of the Atkins diet (which in itself is not really a safe eating plan to use for a prolonged period, but works wonders in it's recommended 2 week duration) carbs are cut almost entirely, and by doing this the body is forced to use it's remaining store of carbs, then seek alternative methods of generating energy. How? It remembers how to access the metabolic pathway for using stored fat by generating ketones which are the 2nd source of energy that cells can use. (In fact studies in which slice of live brain cells were placed in a nutrient solution containing glucose and ketones, showed that the ketone level dropped more significantly indicating that they're the preferred source of energy for cells.) It's also significant that cancer cells which primarily use glucose as an energy source do not use ketones as efficiently, and hence tumours don't grow as quickly in people on low-carb diets.
Since your body becomes accustomed to burning fat, the food you eat, though higher in fat & protein than usual is burnt and not stored, and the rich foods you eat are likely to satiate you more quickly and your hunger cravings don't come back so fast because you're not spiking and crashing your blood sugar levels. Most people at some point have eaten a whole pack of cookies or a tub of icecream in a one-sitting binge, and then felt hungry again within hours, but that doesn't generally happen with high-fat / high-protein foods, when was the last time you ate 10 hard-boiled eggs? Why not? You usually feel sated after 1 or 2.
As your body adjusts to the fat burning regime, it begins to use it's own fat stores when you're hungry and weight loss ensues, at this point you begin to reintroduce "good" carbs back into your diet, such as wholegrain bread, brown rice, potatoes, increased amounts of fresh fruit & veg, but if you avoid the high-sugar, highly processed foods you can easily maintain weight loss or a stable weight.
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that high fat causes high bad cholesterol levels, high triglyceride levels and low good cholesterol levels, but this only happens in conjunction with high carbs, since your insulin levels are knocked out of line ensuring that blood sugar is regulated.
Many patients on low-carb diets which use higher percentages of fat & protein, actually show a reduction in bad cholesterol & triglyceride levels and an increase in good cholesterol levels after an initial period while the body adjusts to the fat-burning diet. This is contrary to what is suggested in that high fat alone leads to heart disease, since it's elevated LDL & low HDL cholesterol that're linked with heart conditions, and these issues are more common in obese people who consume much too much carbohydrate.
Anyway, I've gone into way too much detail here to be relevant to the topic, suffice to say that since getting back from UK in January and discovering I was a fat bugger after all the Thanksgiving & Xmas eating, I've been on the Atkins Diet since the beginning of February.
(You know it's getting bad when Jabba The Hutt tries to sue you for infringements on his image rights!
)
Since then I've dropped from 186lbs to 176lbs and counting over the past 3 weeks. (My wife has also dropped 10lbs too!)
Eating a cooked breakfast every day, lots of oily fish, meat in creamy sauces and some fresh veg & salad, but no bread, rice, potatoes or candy! I've laid off alcohol for 2 weeks and have consumed almost 8 pints of water daily so I can assure you that the weight loss is not water alone.
I've not walked into this half-assed and have read an abundance of literature before trying it, but I can't deny that it's working. I'm going to keep going until I hit 170lbs and then reintroduce carbs carefully, but not back up to the recommended 300g per day level. (And I will go back on the beer!
)
If you're one of those people that's instantly dismissed a low-carb diet as dangerous and ineffective purely because it's associated with "dangerous" high-fat, you should do yourself a favour and read up on the subject. The diet isn't necessarily higher in fat than you're eating now, it's just that the percentage of fat in your diet goes up because you cut out carbs.
The common misconception is that you eat nothing but steak and eggs and drink bacon fat, and that would be a horrifically bad eating plan! It's simply not true though!
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*BACK ON-TOPIC*
I love Hummus, but I love Aioli too. 👍
Trader Joe's does a great range of Hummuses (?) Hummi (?) whatever! with added garlic, eggplant, chilli and other such wonderful ingredients.
Mayonaisse by the low-carb dieters reckoning is not unhealthy, and is in fact recommended, (although not the low-fat versions, which're almost always compensated for (as in most low-fat alternatives to anything) by a boost in carb content 👎) That said, I can't stand Mayo anyway, so it doesn't bother me!!
