4 Nutrition Myths Dispelled
Butter is going to clog your arteries
It’s a very basic and surface level viewpoint to think that butter will clog your arteries. What we put in, fat, doesn’t automatically convert to that, fatty deposits, in the human body. The lack of association between butter/saturated fat and heart disease has been demonstrated in quality research since 2014 but the contrary still remains engraved in most people's understanding. A meta analysis involving 630,000 participants demonstrated no association between butter and risk of cardiovascular disease, mortality and type 2 diabetes.
I think the most important thing to consider is that you eat butter in conjunction with a whole foods, varied diet that’s rich in plant matter and good quality animal protein. If you’re slathering butter all over your boston buns and pastries and pasta and sugary treats then yes your risk of heart disease will go up!
2. Salt is bad for you
I’m a big advocate of salt! The general recommendation for our requirement of salt is about 4g or 1 tsp per day. If you eat a largely whole foods diet - meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, whole grains, eggs and dairy - then the only salt you get is from what you add. If however you eat a lot of processed food - biscuits, pre-made meals, tinned items, breads, flavourings, crackers - then these foods already contain salt in their ingredients and so adding more will take you over this threshold. This is when the level of sodium can cause an increase in blood pressure and put you at risk of various illnesses.
So if you know you eat a largely whole foods diet then it’s really important to use a good quality salt - I like sea salt the best - as the electrolytes within this are crucial to your physiology. Every cell in your body has an electrical charge and this affects how it can function. It’s the electrolyte level in and around the cell that determines this charge.
And if you largely eat processed foods, thinking about changing this as opposed to just minimising your salt intake as this will benefit your health in a much greater way.
3. Eat less, exercise more and you’ll lose weight
In SOME cases this will work! If you have no stress, very balanced hormones, aren’t exposed to toxins, have a good sleep and have a healthy gut then this approach will probably work for you. But for most people this is not the case! There are so many factors that impact weight gain and weight loss that it can become a very complex picture. I often say to clients ‘weight loss is a bi-product of getting everything else right.’ Our body’s naturally want to be at a healthy weight and so weight gain is typically a symptom of an unhealthy body - whether that be a sign of stress, inflammation, hormone imbalance or toxicity.
If you take the eat less and exercise more approach it will often work for a period of time and then you’ll either get stuck in your tracks and nothing will budge or you will gain all the weight back, plus a little, because you can’t keep up the regime.
4. Replacing meals with ‘shakes’ will make you lose weight
This is an interesting one! I’m not sure where it’s come from? Perhaps it feels like you’re eating less if you just have a shake. I don’t like the work shake at all actually! ‘Smoothie’ I understand but ‘shake’ is different! Diet culture loves to provide these supposed quick fix approaches. Liquid meals can hold a place particularly as an easy way to bang a lot of nutrition into an easy to digest meal such as soup or smoothie. However, if these are not nutritionally replete or made from a pre-made mix then they’re probably going to spike your blood sugar levels and leave you feeling unsatisfied due to the lack of chewing. In terms of evidence to support the notion that a shake diet will help you to lose weight there is basically no evidence to support this in the long-term.
