Weight of Americans
Americans still have been gaining weight, although they have cut their average fat intake from 36 to 34 percent of their total diets in the past 15 years. And indeed, cutting fat to control or lose weight makes sense. Fat has nine calories per gram. Protein and carbohydrates (碳水化合物) which break down into amino acids and sugars respectively, have just four. Moreover, the body uses fewer calories to metabolize (新陈代谢) fat than it does to metabolize other foods.
But cutting fat from your diet doesn"t necessarily mean your body won"t store fat. For example, between nonfat and regular cookies, there"s trivial difference in calories because manufacturers make up for the loss of fat by adding sugar. Low-fat crackers, soups and dressings can also be just as high in calories as richer versions. No matter where the calories come from, overeating will still cause weight gain. The calories from fat just do it a little quicker. A Wisconsin computer programmer who decided with a diet coach to eat only 40 grains of fat a day learned the lesson firsthand. He wasn"t losing weight. Then he showed his food diary to his coach and revealed he"d been eating half a pound of jelly beans a day. "They don"t have any fat," he explains. But they had enough sugar to keep him from shedding an ounce.
Nonfat foods become add-on foods. When we add them to our diet, we actually increase the number of calories we eat per day and gain weight. That was born out in a Pennsylvania State University study. For breakfast, Prof. Barbara Roils gave two groups of women yogurt that contained exactly the same amount of calories. One group"s yogurt label said "high fat"—the other, "low fat". The "low fat" yogurt group ate significantly more calories later in the day than the other group. "People think they"ve saved fat and can indulge themselves later in the day with no adverse consequences," says Richard Mattes, a nutrition researcher at Purdue University. "But when they do that, they don"t compensate very precisely, and they often end up overdoing it." Weight of AmericansWhat lesson did the computer programmer learn