Hopefully the title got your attention. I bet it did, and because the basic truth in the title is very counter-intuitive. (Unless you've been keeping up with studies in this area the last few years.) 

Most people equate dietary fat with body fat. This is a mistake, one born of a coincidence of labels we use and reinforced by poor science, misguided government policy, and effective marketing by food companies. 

Let me clarify the title claim. Eating dietary fat as part of a low-bad carbohydrate diet is what will help you lose body fat much more effectively than a low-fat diet would, and this is the conclusion of a notable study. (More on this trial soon.) The study also concluded that low-carb diets also make you less likely to have severe coronary heart disease when compared to a low-fat diet. 

Whew. I know this information is a lot to take in all at once, so you can take a break.

Back with me? Great. I know this news is shocking to you because your doctor or your parents' doctors and also your friends and family and also "the media" have been telling us for years to eat a low-fat diet. In other words, no ghee and no coconut oil, and it was okay to eat more rice and breads. 


Unfortunately, this was wrong. Absolutely wrong. The kind of Indian food we should all eat for the very best health, and to lose body fat, is Indian food that is essentially low in bad carbs. 

I am writing on this topic today because of a recent NY Times article that made it to front page (which is not typical of diet-related topics) which is on a recently published clinical diet trial funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Read the NY Times article "A Call for a Low-Carb Diet" by clicking here. 

This really is well-written, and the trial is well-designed. Seriously, Times reporter Anahad O'Connor explains the design and outcomes of the trial and why low-carb diet seems to work so clearly and beautifully that I am publishing passages from her article at the risk of being censured by the Times.

That's how important I feel it is for you to read what she reports. The article is also so long I will split the passages and my take on sections into two posts. Moving on...

First, what's great about this diet trial is that the subjects are relatively numerous and racially diverse (so that findings can apply to many kinds of people, not just say white or Indian men). The trial had 119 people (out of 148 initially) limit their amount of dietary fat or dietary carbs intake for 1 year. Their weight and blood biomarkers for cardiovascular disease were analyzed.

Another great thing about this trial is that subjects were NOT encouraged to count calories. This mimics the real world, where most of us do not count calories. Nobody likes to be a bean-counter (i.e., accountant, or in this case calorie-counter) on everything they eat.

I myself tried calorie-counting years ago in college. But I was too busy with real math (calculus) to keep it going beyond a couple months. And it did not make a difference. It stressed me out some. And I found it was more effective to focus on cutting obviously bad food like soda and cookies (but not the pizza admittedly) out completely. I'm in better shape today than I was back then, thanks in large part to eating a pretty low-bad carb diet.

Okay, first passage:

Again, the great thing is the subjects were not told to count calories. This makes the trial's outcomes, whatever they would be, more applicable to you and me. This trial showed us that to lose body fat, nobody has to be a bean-counter.

Next, the trial's lead author mentions the mistrust and fear many health experts carry in their attitudes against the low-carb diet.

Two important points are made in the above passage. One we know already: that low-carb diets help people lose more weight than low-fat diets. 

The second point is that people lose muscle mass on low-fat diets. Losing muscle is bad in general, but specifically because less muscle means less basal metabolism, which translates to less burning of body fat. Low-carb diets, on the other hand, did not seem to be associated with loss of muscle. Yet another reason to NOT eat a low-fat diet, especially if trying to lose body fat.

Now let's look more closely at what the low-carb (note experts associated with this trial also call low-carb diet a "high-fat" diet) and low-fat groups ate. This section can really guide what you eat if you decide to adopt a low-carb diet.

There are a couple of stark difference to emphasize.

One, the low-fat group ate more grains, cereal and starches, in other words more refined grains (from wheat, rice, corn, etc.). Also, this group's fat intake complied with US government recommendations. Note the trial found the low-fat group did worse, which reflects poorly on refined grains and government recommendations.

Two, the low-carb (also known as high-fat) group had more than twice the percentage of calories coming from saturated fats (probably in some part thanks to butter and eggs) as what is recommended by the AHA. Yet, the low-carb group had better blood biomarkers such as triglycerides than did the low-fat group.

Alright, that's enough analysis of this very interesting clinical diet trial for now. We'll save some more eye-opening analysis of the study and learning somethings new for the next post. Coming soon, so stay tuned!

For more details on the trial, see Bazzano LA et al. Effects of Low-Carbohydrate and Low-Fat Diets: A Randomized Trial. Ann Intern Med. 2014;161(5):309-318. 

I love "life hacks"! (Life hacks are tips that save time, money and/or having to clean a big mess, which are awesome.) When I saw this hack for one of our favorite foods, I had to post this up. 

Mangos are great. From both a health and taste standpoint. But they are a pain in the youknowwhat to cut and peel. And they're a mess too. So this technique I first saw on Lifehacker is golden. You save time, avoid a big mess, and get to keep more of your mango to eat after you're done.

If you have a "life hack" for Indian food you'd like to share with everybody here, let us know by writing us at info@healthyindiandiet.com. Thanks! 

"Fat is not fattening. Eating when you don’t yet need refueling is what makes you fat, and high-carbohydrate eating is what causes the craving to eat too often."

- Mr. Money Moustache in his blog post "The Amazing Waist-Slimming, Wallet-Fattening Nutrient"

I don't write on exercise much here. My focus has been and will be how to eat well. But I should expand the focus here to talk about the physical part of the equation of being healthy too. 

People have asked me what is the best way to exercise. (To get the health benefits of course, but they also want to know how best to exercise to lose weight.) To which I have always answered with "high intensity interval exercise". People would then reply, "Huh?" 

This is because nobody talks about high intensity interval exercise. But experts in the fitness world have been big about interval training for a long, long time because of results they have seen among themselves and their clients.

Lately, the scientific communities that study the fitness part of the health equation are becoming big about interval exercise too. They have shown in small studies that people who are obese lose more weight by interval exercise than by continuous exercise. 

A radio story on my local National Public Radio station reminded me of this. It describes a small study where people with diabetes were requested to exercise by the high intensity interval approach. They were told to walk -- yes walk, not run -- for 3 minutes at a slow pace followed by 3 minutes at a fast pace, then slow, then fast, and so on for 1 hour everyday.

A 2nd group of people with diabetes were told to walk at a continuous pace for 1 hour with no change in their rate of walking. A 3rd group was told to carry on with their daily routine. The study went on like this for 8 months.

What did the researchers expect? That both exercise groups would have better blood glucose control -- a critical health goal for diabetics -- than would the 3rd group. But the results surprised them. 

The group that exercised for 1 hour every day at a continuous pace showed no improvement in their blood glucose control. But the group who exercised for 1 hour every day by the high intensity interval approach improved their blood glucose control.

The NPR journalist said: "their glucose disposal — the ability to move sugar out of the circulating bloodstream and into parts of the body where it can be used as fuel — improved by 20 percent compared with the nonexercising group. And their hemoglobin A1C levels, a longer-term measure of blood sugar dipped slightly too.

If blood glucose control was improved by fast then slow walking, just imagine what people can do by jogging, bicycling, swimming or running in the same fast and slow interval! So why did the people who exercised for the same amount of time -- but in fast and slow interval -- have such different results?

One of the experts told NPR, "'It's this switch between the intensities that we think is critical here,' says Solomon. 'You're able to work hard, and then rest hard ... rather than just walking at a fixed pace... And during the high-intensity bursts, your muscles need more fuel in the form of glucose.

"'It makes sense that intervals would help people with blood sugar control,' says Dr. Tim Church, a professor of preventive medicine at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.

"He explains that our [skeletal] muscles are the No.1 consumer of blood sugar in our bodies.

"So, when we do things such as short bursts of high-impact aerobic activity, 'you're pulling excess sugar out of the blood, which results in healthier blood sugar levels,' Church says."

So the Healthy Indian knows to get better results -- for the health benefits, to lose body fat too -- to exercise by high intensity interval, or basically to go fast for a few minutes when walking, jogging, running or any aerobic, then slow for a few minutes, then fast, then slow and so on instead of spending a really long time in the gym.

Read more about this study in NPR's story here.

"Perfect is the enemy of good." 

This famous quote, attributed to Voltaire, is a useful reminder when we embark on doing something new. Because no mindset works against us more when we start something new than the perfectionist's mindset. 

Know a perfectionist? You probably do. We all know somebody who decided to do something new, hard, and noble -- quit smoking, learn how to play an instrument, or eat from a new diet. It is all that person would talk about. She or he talked about it all the time because she was obsessed, and also because she was trying to keep herself true and perfect to adopting this new thing in her life. 

What happened then when she made one little mistake? When she lit up a cigarette after being good for 3 and not having one, or when she did not pick up the guitar for 2 days after being good about strumming it daily for two weeks, or when she ate a sandwich after swearing off bread and being good about avoiding it for a week? 

This perfectionist, after one such small mistake, she quit her noble cause. Why? Because she put way too much pressure on herself. She created way too high expectations for herself on being able to follow through this new thing perfectly. And thus, she set herself up to fail. 

So what then is the best mindset when doing something new, hard, and noble, like adopting new foods into what you eat everyday and letting go of old favorites to lose weight and become healthier? 

The answer is the mindset that let's you feel okay failing on occasion. In fact, build failure into your diet. Use Pareto's principle of 80/20, where you do things right 80% of the time, and 20% of the time you give yourself leeway to do the wrong thing. 

If you plan to eat the right foods and not any bad ones for 4 weeks, I encourage you on 1 day to eat all the crap food you like. For 6 days, eat the right food. And if on one of those weeks, you eat the wrong food on 2 days, be okay with it. Just go back to eating right 6 days a week.

The wrong mindset tells you to try eating right for all 7 days a week, all 4 weeks a month,. The pressure and expectations to follow through everyday is much too high for our human nature, so you will quit doing the right thing altogether. Try to be perfect, and oddly enough, you will be far from achieving your goal of losing weight and become healthier versus if you tried to perfect most of the time and imperfect on a day or two each week. 

So the Healthy Indian knows this well: Aim to be almost perfect, but never perfect, when doing something new, hard and noble like eating better food and not the old crap food you liked so much, in order to achieve success.

National Geographic Magazine ran an article on sugar in their August 2013 issue. What makes it interesting and worth a read (available for free here) is you learn much of the history and social aspects of sugar production and consumption. For example, did you know sugar was being refined and turned into the white powder we are familiar with today -- back in 500 A.D.?

But what makes this article really interesting to me is it's perspective on sugar's effect on health. This passage is the tastiest morsel, but I encourage you to take the whole course. 

"[Fat] makes up a smaller portion of the American diet than it did 20 years ago. Yet the portion of America that is obese has only grown larger. The primary reason, says [kidney doctor Richard] Johnson, along with other experts, is sugar, and in particular fructose... 

Table sugar (called sucrose) is half glucose and half fructose. Glucose, which is used by nearly every call in the body for energy, also stimulates the production and release of insulin, the hormone that signal our fat cells to become fatter. 

Fructose, on the other hand is the sweeter sugar found in fruits and also processed foods, is metabolized primarily by our liver, which makes blood fats called triglycerides. To quote the NGM article:

"Some of these fats stay in the liver, which over long exposure can turn fatty and dysfunctional. But a lot of the triglycerides are pushed out into the blood too. Over time, blood pressure goes up, and tissues become progressively more resistant to insulin. The pancreas responds by pouring out more insulin, trying to keep things in check. Eventually a condition known as metabolic syndrome kicks in, characterized by obesity, especially around the waist; high blood pressure; and other metabolic changes that, if not checked, can lead to type 2 diabetes, with a heightened danger of heart attack thrown in for good measure. As much as a third of the American adult population could meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome set by the National Institutes of Health."

On this blog, I have focused on the harmful effects of glucose because that is what our experts have studied and understood well. Fructose though has largely been ignored, but at our peril. Luckily experts like Dr. Robert Lustig are shining the light on fructose. 

Bottom line is still the same: sugars are bad for us, and eating too much causes us to become fatter and eventually obese. And thus we should avoid processed foods with easily digestible sugars (as they have little to no natural fibers to slow down sugar digestion, unlike most fruit).

The best infographic that tells us in simple language why foods with lots of easily digestible carbs (white rice, breads from white flour like chappati, potatoes, and fried snacks) are worse than foods with lots of dietary fats. (Courtesy of Massive Health.) Enjoy!

If you want to lose body fat and lose it quickly, the most effective thing you must do it cut down all carbs completely. By carbs, I mean all processed foods, but also all grains and sugars and forms of starches.  

So cut out all white rice and breads from (wheat) flour like naan and chappatti. Cut out all potatoes too as they contain starch. And you must cut it for 1-2 weeks, which is an "induction period".

You must cut down even whole grains. Yes, whole grains. You know, brown rice, whole wheat, and multi-grain products. Cut down on the beans too. Sure, these foods are definitely on the healthy side because they have fiber and nutrients, and they definitely belong in the The Healthy Indian Diet. But they are easily digestible carbs because of the starch inside. So you should cut down on them for a while if you want to lose weight.

Rule #6: Cut All Grains, Sugars and Starches for the First Two Weeks

Where is the evidence that a low-to-no carb diet can help you lose weight. Is there any? Yes, plenty.

The A to Z trial done at Stanford examined the effect of diet on about 310 obese women, where roughly a fourth were on one of four popular diets for a year. Guess which diet let to the greatest weight loss... It was the Atkins Diet. The Atkins Diet is low-carb, high-protein, and high-fat. 

This result surprised the lead researcher Dr. Gardener, and he admits in his lecture seen on YouTube that he was also surprised that the Atkins Diet improved blood fat (cholesterol) levels the most, too. 

An Israeli trial among about 320 moderately obese people examined the effects of three diets: low-fat, low-carb, and Mediterranean diets. Conducted over 2 years, those who adhered to the low-carb diet ate the least amount of carbs and the most amount of protein and fat compared to the others. Who lost the most weight? Right, the people on the low-carb (and high-fat and protein) diets. The same result is seen in a trial on 200 overweight people in Germany, where low-carb dieters lost more weight than low-fat dieters.

These results show that eating very low levels of carbs is the most effective thing for losing weight. They also show that dietary fat does not equal body fat, though related, and that eating a lot of dietary fats do not make us fatter the way that eating a lot of carbs do.

The science behind this counter-intuitive concept is the effect of glucose, a sugar released from carbs during digestion of foods, on the hormone insulin, and insulin's signaling fat tissue to get fatter (using a glycol backbone from carbs and fatty acid chains from dietary fats), which makes us fatter especially in areas deemed unhealthy, namely around our abdominal trunk. (You know, "Beer Gut" or "Wheat Belly"!)

A Healthy Indian thus cuts out all rice, all breads -- wheat products like chapati, roti, and naan, and also stuff made of millet, chickpea flour and other such stuff --, all sweets, all fried snacks broadly called "nasta" which is essentially a mix of carbs and burnt oils, and all potato foods, for at least 2 weeks. And honestly, a Healthy Indian barely eats this stuff after the 2-week induction period. 

So then, if you cut all these carbs for 2 weeks, what can you eat? 

Plenty! Foods with proteins and foods with good fats. If you eat meat, it is relatively easy. I advocate healthier stuff like fish and chicken. Eggs are one of the most perfect foods in my opinion. And if a vegetarian, you can easily eat high-protein and high-fat foods such as yogurt and milk, avocado, and all kinds of nuts.

If you must eat beans or whole grains for whatever reason or cravings, keep them to an absolute minimum. As a rule of thumb, eat in half the portion you're accustomed to, such as a single roti instead of two.  Also, eat foods fruits and vegetables, essentially carbs, because they come with fiber and are not starchy, meaning the sugar (glucose) inside will not affect your body as quickly or strongly as sugars coming from starch-dense foods like beans and potatoes. 

So the Healthy Indian, knowing it is difficult but it is also doable, will eat low-to-no carbs for at least 2 weeks to lose body fat and transform him or herself into a healthier person!

Now for the first rule on eating LESS of something, instead of MORE. That something is processed foods, the single category I believe is responsible for people getting fatter more than any other. 

Rule #5: Eliminate Processed Food (or Eat Real Food)

If you've read "The Healthy Indian Diet", you know easily digestible carbohydrates are associated with people becoming fatter. The explanation is straightforward: carbs breakdown into glucose in our intestines, and this glucose is absorbed into our bloodstream and causes levels of the hormone insulin to spike. Insulin then signals our fat cells to get fatter. So the higher our digestible carb intake, the higher our insulin levels are, and the likelier we are to get fat.

Easily digestible carbs -- particularly flour, sugar, and products made from them -- are the bulk of processed foods. By processed foods I mean fried flour products like sev and other dry nasto ("snack food"), chips, cookies, and Indian sweets, and also fast food (like McDonald's burger and fries) and street food (like pav bhaji).

These fried carbs, in addition to fast and bountiful amounts of glucose, give the body free radicals which are created when oils are heated in high temperatures. Free radicals lead to oxidative stress, which has been linked to inflammation generally and specifically to obesity.

But beyond the effects of flour, sugar and other easily digestible carbs on our glucose, insulin, and body fat levels, why are processed foods so bad for your weight and your health? 

Well, according to this insightful editorial in 2011, processed (or "ultraprocessed") foods, made possible thanks to food technologies, have ruined much of our natural food and made us fatter for many other reasons. 

Those reasons are being high in calories, largely thanks to there being so many sweeteners. They are eaten in large portions because we do not get easily satisfied or full. They contain very little fiber, which helps in weight loss. (They also contain too little nutrition.) Also processed foods contain many chemicals, some of which some experts believe cause harmful hormonal effects on our bodies including making us fatter.

In contrast, real food -- unprocessed foods (like vegetables from your garden) or lightly processed foods (think yogurt from the store) -- is lower in calories, have more good fats and good carbs (such as fiber, a non-digestible carb), is more satisfying so we don't eat as much, and does not contain potentially harmful chemicals. So the Healthy Indian gets rid of all processed foods in the home and eats only real food to lose weight!