Lowcarbezine!

Low Fat Products Revisited

When one is as outspokenly opinionated as I, it is inevitable that sooner or later one will have the disconcerting experience of having to eat one's words (hoping that they're low carb.) That day has come. It is time for me to issue a revised opinion of some low fat products.

My opinion of low fat products was, for a very long time, scornful in the extreme. I still find many of them appallingly bad, and revoltingly full of sugar. Many of the fat free salad dressings, for instance, are little more than spicy corn syrup, and low fat ice creams generally add extra sugar to make up for the texture lost when the fat is removed. Regular mayonnaise has 0 grams of carb per cup, while light mayonnaise often has over 35 grams. Low fat frozen meals bulk up the volume by adding plenty of rice, noodles, or potatoes. Low fat sauces leave out the cream, but add a ton of cornstarch. And of course, much of the low fat stuff falls into the category of "nutritionless processed garbage" anyway - a category into which a distressing number of the new low carb specialty products also fit, I'm sorry to say.

Furthermore, I believe that getting the preponderance of my calories from fat - so long as it's unprocessed healthy fat - is actually good for me. Accordingly, I have long disdained low fat products.

I have changed my mind, though in a very limited fashion. I have found, upon further research, that there are some sorts of foods where removing the fat is not followed by adding corn syrup or corn starch, and accordingly, these products are lower in calories while remaining low in carbs. Since, carb counts being equal, eating somewhat fewer calories beats eating somewhat more calories, I see no reason not to use these products.

Which products? Reduced fat dairy products. I was shopping for cream cheese to make a cheese cake, a few months ago, and was startled to discover that the "lite" cream cheese actually had fractionally fewer carbs than the full fat stuff, and of course it was lower calorie, as well. I could see no reason not to choose the "lite" cream cheese, so I did, and my cheesecake was very nice, too.

So I took a look at reduced fat dairy products. Turns out that many, particularly cheese and sour cream, do not have objectionable ingredients added. (The exception is reduced fat grated Parmesan cheese, which has a bunch of junk added to it.) Furthermore, most of them have few, if any, more grams of carbohydrate per serving than the full fat varieties (some of which do have objectionable ingredients added.) Land O Lakes "light butter" is okay, too, if pricey.

Many of us have added yogurt back to our diets since The GO-Diet explained that most of the carbohydrate in the milk it's made from is actually converted into lactic acid by the yogurt bacteria. If you are a fan of yogurt - I am! - fat free yogurt has exactly the same carb count as low fat or full fat, and finding plain yogurt with no additives is easy. Ignore the 12 grams of carbohydrate listed on the yogurt label, and count 4 grams per cup.

Avoid fat-free processed dairy products - fat free 'half and half,' sour cream, cheese, and the like. Not only do these taste god-awful, but unlike the reduced fat products, they often have corn syrup and other junk added. And of course, there's never a substitute for reading labels!

I see no reason not to use reduced-fat sour cream and cheese. Many of us have learned that even on a low carbohydrate diet we can't eat unlimited calories and still lose weight. And while I will never advocate a low fat diet, fat is the fraction of our diet which is expandable and contractible.

What do I mean by that? Look at it this way. We eat a fairly fixed amount of protein - I know that I get between 100 - 125 grams per day. Since protein has 4 calories per gram, protein accounts for between 400 and 500 calories per day. I try to stay below 50 grams of carb per day, and usually end up below 40. Since carbs also have 4 calories per gram, that means that most days I'm getting no more than 160 calories per day from carbohydrate. 660 calories per day is nowhere near enough!

The rest of those calories are going to come from fat. I shoot for about 1800 calories per day, which means I need 1,140 calories from fat. Since fat has 9 calories per gram, that means I need roughly 125 grams of fat per day. That sounds like a lot, I know, but remember - just about all of our protein foods contain fat, too. A 6-ounce broiled hamburger has 28 grams of fat. An ounce of cheddar cheese has 9 grams of fat, and an egg has 5, so a two-egg cheese omelet will have about 19 grams of fat - and that's if you don't add any fat to the pan. You see how this can add up.

So if you, like me, have found that you can't eat unlimited calories on your low carb diet, fat is the fraction of your diet that you can change. Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating a low fat diet! I get just over 60% of my calories from fat, and it seems to do me nothing but good. Just saying that I'd rather keep an eye on my fat just a little, than cut out the protein and my few grams of carb. In that context, reduced fat dairy products make some sense.

Furthermore, as you'll read in the letters below, while most people see an improvement in their blood cholesterol levels on a low carbohydrate diet using unlimited saturated fat, not everyone does. Some people's high cholesterol seems to come solely from carb intolerance, while other people also are "saturated fat responders" and need to slant their low carb diets away from saturated fat, toward monounsaturates like olive oil, nuts, and avocados. For these people, too, reduced fat dairy products are a good idea.

Please, do not take this as a pronouncement that you should use reduced fat products. If you're doing fine on your low carb program using full-fat everything, hey, go to it. Just want you to know that reduced fat dairy is okay if you feel it will be useful for you.

(Just a final note: I trust you all know that lean cuts of meat are just as carb free as fatty ones, right? Again, if you're watching calories as well as carbs, or have found that you're a saturated fat responder, there's no reason not to eat ground round instead of the fattier ground beef, or skinless chicken breast instead of the stuff with skin.) (But I, for one, am not giving up my chicken skin. Yum.)

Posted by HoldTheToast at March 26, 2004 05:35 PM