Alex B said:
That's fine as long as you don't want to eat anything else with any calories in it ever.
We had a delicious low fat korma the other day. It was delicious and it was low fat. What is anyone's problem with that?
Not saying there's anything wrong with your korma, but I've looked at quite a few of these "look after yourself" type things in the supermarket, which generally advertise themselves on the basis of being low-fat (aside: I'd love to market a product which claimed to be "0% FAT FREE!!!1!"
), and it's alarming to note that, quite often, they're actually HIGHER in sugar than the fat-loaded version, and in some cases higher in calories, too, or at least stuffed with saccharin or aspartame (some claims that this is implicated in a wide range of health problems have been made about the latter, as well as questions about the validity of its approval for use as a food additive, and it has to be avoided by people intolerant to phenylalanine).
This highlights for me, the total fatuousness (pun not intended) of the marketing of food products on a "healthy" basis: the manufacturers & supermarkets have jumped onto the "must eat less fat" bandwagon, without actually addressing WHY we must eat less fat. If we eat less fat, but make up for it with sugar, we just end up making our OWN fat. It's not solely about fat - it's about balancing the intake of energy with the expenditure of energy, such that we end up not getting overweight. It's true that fat, as an energy source, is more "dense" than sugars, but the other side of that coin is that fats are metabolised more slowly than sugars, which can (and do) cause blood sugar spikes that increase appetite when they drop again, and have the potential to cause diabetes, while fats, which are much slower to digest, can tend to make people feel "fuller" for longer, and therefore potentially less liable to keep eating.
The same goes for the substitution of saturated fat in the diet with hydrogenated trans-fatty acids (per my earlier rant). Sure, they get to put "100% polyunsaturated fats" on the packet, but they don't tell you that you're probably INCREASING your risk of coronary heart disease by consuming trans-fats rather than the saturated fats in, say, butter.
Furthermore, a lot of these low-fat foods are highly processed, in order to be able to appear and function as traditionally high-fat foods, without actually containing the fat. That means considerably increased levels of adulterants, preservatives, and all the other gubbins that goes with processed foods. Given the record of additives over the decades (tartrazine/E102, trans-fats, palm oil, high-fructose corn syrups, aspartame) to turn out to have profound negative implications for health years after their introduction, I tend to the view that the less of such things I eat, the less likely I am to discover that something I've been happily gorging myself on for years is suddenly discovered to be seriously bad for me.
My approach tends to be (and I speak as someone who is overweight, doesn't take enough exercise, has high blood pressure and cholesterol) that if I want to eat low-fat food, there's no point trying to pretend: if I want a low-fat curry, I'll make it with a tomato sauce, and get my polyunsaturates from olive oil. Meanwhile, I'll attempt to enjoy my lusciously high-fat cheesy stuff in moderation.
I do, however, have some way to go before I'm fully practising what I preach
.
