A spoonful of fat makes nature’s medicine go down (along with the pounds)

July 10, 2017 Ashley 0 Comments

Poppins always said:

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

But, you know what it also does?

Drive the scale numbers up – like some majestic umbrella being commandeered by a sky-bound British babysitter. That’s why I prefer Hippocrates’ idea about medicine – to let our food be our pharmaceutical. To let our sustenance be the one that keeps us from being sick in the first place. (Which will then keep us from needing chemical, manufactured pharmaceuticals, teeming with side effects – or the fat inducing sugar that helps it go down.) “Let thy food be thy medicine,” he said. And you wanna know the nice thing? Most of the foods that help you battle maladies of all sorts, are also the ones that’ll help you lose weight (and escape the clutches of that malevolent nanny’s dastardly diabetic wish she clearly has on all of us).

So, how can we optimize our prescription provender?

(Aside from avoiding Mary’s healthless saccharine answer to everything?)

(“Maybe if you didn’t suck down so much sugar, you’d be light like us too…”)

Well, first, we can eat our greens. The benefits of that have been proven already for sure.

But the fun supplemental fact to that – what you may not’ve read about yet – is how you can absorb more of the illness preventing nutrients in your emerald edibles, just by adding a little healthy fat. And, while that’s fantastic for helping you stay more alive than an iconic Bee Gees’ song (that’ll now be stuck in your head for the rest of the day), it’s also awesome for improving the quality of that alive-ness. (Not the least of which includes weight loss.) See, the thing about health is that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Often, when we’re putting on weight outta nowhere, it’s due to something that can be traced back to a nutrient deficiency. We get frustrated because we’re “eating all the right things”, yet not losing weight. That’s when we give up completely – thinking we’re just built badly, that we’re meant to be fat, and terminate our great diets, by saying we “might as well eat whatever” we want. ‘cause we’re gonna be fat anyway, right?

Well, before you Dyson that pizza slice through your face hole in one inhalation, hear this: often, we aren’t absorbing all the nutrients in the foods we’re eating. That means you can eat a whole bouquet of broccoli, squash, and carrots, and still be deficient in all the goodies some of ‘em have to offer. Your body’s just not sucking it up. And, while that can mean you’re deficient in any number of things (in which case a workup done by the doc is your best bet), sometimes it’s as simple as adding some healthy fat (like the kind you get in avos, nuts, and seeds). By doing that, scientists say we stand to assimilate all that nutrient-y goodness in our greens and put it to use – in preventing everything from death inducing illnesses to weight gain. And that’s because having the right nutrients in place can make the difference between perpetual cravings (for confections and all the other bad stuff) and satiation. The result? We’re balanced instead’ve ravenous and so healthy that we’re unlikely to need any medicine or the sugar that makes it bearable.

In sum, some healthy fat can help make’s nature’s food-pharmaceuticals (the kind you truly need) go down.

Along with the numbers on your scale.