Carbohydrates are also less satiating than fat or protein. So you eat more and the weight creeps up.

Do You Live in the Fattest State?

A state known for blue skies and wide-open spaces is the nation's thinnest for the first time, knocking Colorado, another haven for outdoor lovers, out of the top spot, according to the 2013 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The least-obese state, Montana, was also the only state to have an obesity rate below 20 percent. Only 19.6 percent of survey participants from the state were obese. 

After three years at the top of the most-obese list, West Virginia finally fell and was replaced by a new state. Across all states, for the fifth year in a row, the obesity rate has increased, going up nearly a full percentage point from 26.2 percent in 2012 to 27.1 percent in 2013. 

 WHY?

The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade

Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks. 

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study's star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese. 

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders' diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren't revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma. 

The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease. 

Indeed, up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for "soft drinks," and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of "gum-drops" and "hard candies made primarily with sugar" to avoid fatty foods. 

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys's hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation's health woes.

Why I've ditched statins for good

As experts clash over proposals that millions more of us take statins to prevent heart disease and stroke, a vascular surgeon explains why he feels better without them

The only major changes I’d made to my lifestyle since coming off statins were eliminating sugar (including alcohol and starchy foods such as bread) and eating more animal fat. Many experts now believe that sugar is emerging as a true villain in the heart-disease story; while after decades of demonisation, saturated fat has been acquitted of causing heart disease by a recent “meta” analysis of 70 studies by Cambridge University. 

Typically, I was eating red meat three or four times a week and enjoying butter, full-fat milk and plenty of eggs. You would have thought that after three months on a diet so high in saturated fat, my cholesterol would have shot back up to pre-statin levels — but no, it came down and has stayed down seven months on. Not only that, but my levels of LDL (so-called bad cholesterol) were also lower than when I’d been on statins, and my ratio of HDL (so-called good cholesterol) to LDL was under four for the first time, an excellent sign, according to medical wisdom.

I was wrong - we should be feasting on FAT, says The Fast Diet author DR MICHAEL MOSLEY

• Dr Mosley used to believe all saturated fats were bad for us
• So he ditched beef, full fat milk and butter
• They were thought to cause weight gain and heart attacks
• But new studies have revealed this isn't the case
• There's a stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease
• Eggs are a prime example of how we got it wrong on fats
• People were advised to eat just one a week in the Eighties
• But now regular consumption is encouraged as they are high in protein

Milk, cheese, butter, cream - in fact all saturated fats - are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. 

During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. 

Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I've been dishing out about fat. 

In fact, as a renowned British scientist called John Yudkin pointed out, there was actually a much stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease. 

Professor Yudkin argued that sugar was behind the rise in heart disease ravaging the West. He also pointed to another dangerous trend emerging in Fifties Britain: the close relationship between the number of televisions being bought and fatal heart attacks. 

Carbohydrates are also less satiating than fat or protein. So you eat more and the weight creeps up. 

So, is fat really fattening? It contains far more calories than carbohydrates or protein, and the easiest way to lose weight is obviously to cut it out. Yet low-fat diets rarely succeed because people won't stick to them - they get too hungry.

DYI Comments:  I have cut back to less than 5% of my intake in carbohydrates over the past year and have dropped 35 pounds but more importantly my blood pressure medication Losartan has been lowered from 100 Mg to 25 Mg.  Depending on my blood pressure readings over the next week I may come off medication completely and so far the readings have been better than 120/80....Plus I have energy to burn and for a guy of almost 60 years old is exciting all by itself.  Once I dropped off the carbs significantly the weight just came off (1 to 2 pounds per week) AND IT WAS EASY.  So easy I wish I had known this years ago.  [I also have an extra surprise a 4 pack....will a 6 pack be in my future???]  This has been one hell of an eye opener.

DYI

I'm not a Doctor or Nutritionist just one man's journey!