Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

266 Elite Physique
to do a little guesswork since it’s virtually impossible to determine exactly how
much protein is in a piece of meat or fish or an egg. As a general rule, expect one
ounce of animal protein and one large egg to contain 7 grams of protein. So in
our previous example of 32 grams of protein at each meal, you could consume
five ounces of grass-finished beef, or five whole eggs, or three ounces of beef
plus two eggs, all of them equally somewhere around 35 grams. Sure, it’s not
exactly 32 grams, but it gets the job done without measuring fractions of ounces
or consuming part of an egg.
Fat
Concern about the amounts and types of fat in our diets first took root in the 1950s.
Heart disease was the leading cause of death in the United States, killing half a
million Americans each year, twice as many as all cancers combined. Ancel Keys,
the country’s most respected nutrition scientist (he invented K rations, which fed
millions of American soldiers in World War II), set out to prove it was caused by
saturated fat consumption (Keys, Anderson, and Grande 1965).
Keys was right about a few things. Postwar prosperity allowed Americans to
stuff themselves, and he was among the first to sound the alarm on the emerging
obesity epidemic. He also raised awareness of the connection between high blood
cholesterol levels and heart disease risk. Finally, he was the first to promote what
he called a Mediterranean diet, with lots of plant-based foods (fruits, vegetables,
grains, olive oil) and very little meat.
The problem wasn’t the theory. It was the application. Once the government
got behind the idea that saturated fat was the dietary equivalent of communism,
the solutions were catastrophic. Food manufacturers replaced animal fats with
oils made from corn, soybeans, and cottonseed, which were previously unknown
in the human diet and pro-inflammatory (Ng et al. 2014). The production of
another substitute, palm oil, is considered both an environmental and human
rights disaster (Kadandale, Marten, and Smith 2019).
The availability of all these new fats, combined with cheap sweeteners made
from corn, made convenience foods cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever,
leading to massive overconsumption. The rise in obesity was apparent by the
mid-1980s (Hales et al. 2018). Although many factors beyond the food on your
plate contribute to obesity, there’s little doubt that the campaign to reduce and
replace saturated fat in the diet backfired.
Recommended Sources of Fat
Earlier we talked about how not all proteins are created equal. Neither are fats—
not by a long shot. Some types of fat can contribute to heart disease; other types
can reduce it. The same is true for chronic inflammation, a significant problem
that contributes to heart disease and makes it hard to reduce belly fat (Golia et
al. 2014; Monteiro and Azevedo 2010).
All the protein sources we covered earlier—grass-finished beef, wild fish,
organic eggs, and so on—contain healthy forms of fat.
Those fats contribute to your health in a number of ways, by
• providing satiety, leaving you less hungry between meals;
• supplying the building blocks of cellular membranes;