Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey your host. Today on the show we are going to complete our “macronutrient series” by talking about the 3rd and final macronutrient, dietary fat. 

As a refresher to remind you, or to bring you up to speed if this is your first time listening, this episode is one of a 3-part series on the macronutrients. There are 3 macronutrients found in our food, and they are carbohydrate, protein and fat. 

I’ve linked to the first 2 episodes on carbohydrate and protein in the show notes, so you can go listen to those episodes after this to have the full picture on the macronutrients that your body needs. 

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not talking about macronutrients in the diet-y sense of the word. I’m not going to be giving you “macros” to count or follow. 

I’m literally talking about the nutrition science of what’s in your food, and what nutrients your body needs in order to function properly. And we’re having this discussion in the context of intuitive eating, and staying out of the diet mentality with food. 

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: The Glucose Goddess

This is one of those people I wish I didn’t even know existed because it’s so troublesome. This woman who calls herself the Glucose Goddess, Jessica Inchauspe (in-chow-spay), has amassed 4.9M followers on IG since just 2019. She gained popularity by sharing graphs of her own CGM results on social media and started telling other people how they should manage their own blood sugar. 

Here is a perfect example of the type of pseudoscientific nonsense that she’s using to sell her books and products: 

In one of her videos on IG she was talking about some study where people were given a voodoo doll to represent their spouse and that every time they got annoyed with their spouse they were supposed to put a pin in the doll, and that allegedly the researchers correlated these voodoo pins with their blood sugar, and she’s using this to say that the reason people get irritated with their partners, or the reason they have poor relationships is because of blood sugar. 

She’s making these leaps and exaggerations to rationalize what she’s selling, and to make it sound legitimate under the guise of science.

So who is Jessica Inchauspe (in-chow-spay), and how did she become the Glucose Goddess? She is a French woman with a degree in mathematics and biochemistry. So she’s obviously intelligent, but this is kind of giving vibes of the guy who invented the BMI – he too was a mathemetician and he was also an astronomer and made up the BMI without it having good science behind it, and it took hold. She’s kind of in that same boat.

(As a side note – for her to be taking her math and biochem degrees and using it to tell people how to eat and what supplements to take (which she conveniently sells) is pretty concerning. There’s a reason that dietitians and people w/ degrees in human nutrition have more than just a biochem degree. Yes, we take biochem, among many other courses in how nutrition works in the human body and how that works at a medical level. She flat out does not have the credentials to be doing what she’s doing – but she’s doing that thing that all these grifters do where she’s hiding behind the degrees she does have and is pretending that they make her qualified to say this stuff. It’s very much like medical doctors or chiropractors who use their degree to sell nutrition and diet related stuff when they don’t have the training and aren’t qualified.)

In 2022 she published a book called “Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar.” 

This is one of those wellness woo trends that has really taken off in recent years, the idea of “balancing” your blood sugar and preventing blood sugar “spikes.” 

There is a lot of misunderstanding wrapped up in this discussion around how blood sugar works, and the idea that we all need to be “balancing” our blood sugar or doing things so it doesn’t “spike.” 

Blood sugar is supposed to go up after you eat. That’s how your body delivers energy to your cells in the form of glucose. If you don’t have an increase in glucose, your cells aren’t getting the energy they need. Your body has built-in ways to manage its blood sugar appropriately. 

So people who are now wearing these CGMs without understanding how it works, and especially when they don’t have diabetes, are seeing a natural phenomenon happening with their blood sugar and are being led to believe that it’s bad and they need to be trying to control it. 

Hence, why people like Jessica Inchauspe (in-chow-spay) are making a crap ton of money selling you nonsense that you don’t need. 

Her first book sold like hot cakes, and her 2nd book that came out in 2023 is called “The Glucose Goddess Method” and it made the NYT bestseller list. 

So you can see how much power and influence this woman has. While selling us Wellness Woo. 

She has been widely criticized by scientists and medical professionals. In fact, one professor at Geneva University Hospital was quoted as saying, “”She hides behind a pseudoscientific appearance to advocate a method which, in my opinion, doesn’t work and is based on very little evidence. The scientific studies she cites are highly anecdotal, or seemingly not applicable to what she proposes.”

On her website she shares testimonials from people who say things like:

• In just one week my skin and hair look better! (that’s not how skin and hair look even if her products and programs worked…)
• I’m in such a good mood it’s ridiculous.
• Every single person on earth should be doing this method.

It’s this pie-in-the sky stuff that doesn’t even biologically make sense – and she’s using it to convince you to buy her books, programs and supplements. 

For $2500 you could take her online course and become “certified” in her method to then teach it to other people. Let’s do some critical thinking here and think about this…any person on the internet who is able and willing to pay that much money to get her fake and meaningless certification can then promote themselves under her brand name as being “Glucose goddess certified” to then give other people advice to manage their health and blood sugar.

People who are actual dietitians or diabetes educators would lose their license if they did this. 

This is straight up dangerous. People who have actual blood sugar issues need to be under medical care. You can die or develop really serious complications from messing with your blood sugar. And people who don’t’ have blood sugar issues shouldn’t be worrying about this in the first place. 

I’m not even going to get into what she’s telling people to do in her books because it would make this episode too long. Let’s just leave it at this – The Glucose Goddess is Wellness Woo. 

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…How much fat does your body need from food?

Let’s recap what we know so far. There are 3 macronutrients: carbohydrate, protein and fat. Macronutrients are the components of food that provide your body with actual energy. That energy comes in the form of calories. The calories in food come from carb, protein and fat. Calories are simply the unit of energy for your body, and not something that we need to be afraid of or avoid. It’s kind of like oxygen – we aren’t judging ourselves for wanting or needing it. We understand that we have to have a certain amount of it, and too much or too little oxygen isn’t good for us. Same with calories. 

I covered carbohydrates back in episode #138, and protein in episode #123. I’ve linked to these episodes in the show notes for you so you can go back and listen to them after this if you want to have a full understanding of how all 3 of these macronutrients work within the context of intuitive eating and the non-diet approach to nutrition. 

I want to reiterate that I’m not talking about macronutrients in the diet culture sense of the word where you hear people talking about “tracking their macros.” That’s just another iteration of dieting, which you know I stand against.

I’m literally talking about macronutrients in the scientific sense of the word. (As a quick side note, there are macronutrients which provide your body with energy, and micronutrients which do all sorts of other important things in your body, and those would be your vitamins and minerals. Those don’t directly give you energy in the sense of calories – that only comes from macronutrients.) 

Now that we have this big picture understanding of macronutrients and how they work in general, let’s drill down on dietary fat. 

What We Learned From the Low Fat Era

Let’s take a trip back in time to the in the 1990’s. TV shows like Friends, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Full House were popular. If you were like me, you were also watching Rescue 911 and Unsolved Mysteries. The infamous OJ Simpson car chase and trial happened. It was also the low fat era where as a culture we were obsessed with avoiding fat in food. We had been led to believe that eating fat is bad for you – that it makes you unhealthy, that it causes weight gain which also makes you unhealthy, and that fat should be avoided at all costs.

We were eating things like Snack Wells Cookies, WOW! Chips, Twizzlers were advertised as healthy candy because it was low in fat, we ate fat-free cheese which was gross and didn’t melt, skim milk was the way to go, and things that were traditionally high in fat like salad dressing were replaced with low fat or fat free alternatives. 

Well, we learned an important lesson from a public health standpoint: Eating a low-fat diet wasn’t making people healthier, nor was it making people less fat. Rates of chronic disease (like cardiovascular disease and diabetes) continued to climb, along with BMI which of course we became particularly obsessed with in the 90’s. That part of the story is a bit misleading, however, because in 1998 the CDC changed the weight cutoffs for BMI, so it looked like there was a sudden jump in so-called “overweight” people, but it was just because they lowered the cutoff from 27.8 to 25. 

Anyway…the moral of the story is that low-fat dieting doesn’t work. It backfired.

Researchers then came out and basically said it turns out they were wrong about how bad fat is. It’s not fat that we should be avoiding, IT’S CARBS! And hence, the low carb and the keto obsession we’ve had since then.

Part of this fear of carbs came from how when they tried to rid our food supply of fat, they had to replace it with something in those foods. So it made our food higher in carbohydrate and it skewed the percentages of where our calories were coming from. So this high carb, low fat diet was proving to not be what’s best for health (and that’s part of how protein has gotten put on such a pedestal).

Here’s the thing, though. We need fat, we need carbs, and we need protein. And what we really need is to stop going to extremes with any of them. 

Let’s take a look at how fat works.

What Is Fat And Why Do We Need It?

First we need to make a distinction. There is a difference between the fat we get from our food, and the fat that is in our body. 

Dietary fat does not automatically become body fat. That’s not how that works. In fact, sometimes when I’m talking with clients I’ll use the term “adipose tissue” for body fat to emphasize that it’s different from the fat we are eating.

Part of why we so easily became afraid of fat in food is because of the negative connotation that we’ve been taught with the word “fat.” The word fat is no longer a neutral descriptor of a person’s body, or of the adipose tissue in your body, or of the fat that’s in food. The word fat has become a word that’s loaded with judgment, shame, fear and all sorts of other negative associations. That’s the root of weight stigma and anti-fat bias that is really well-documented in the research. 

So given that we already believed that body fat and being fat are bad, it was an easy leap to accept the suggestion that eating fat is bad because it must make you fat. Then there was the whole thing about how “fat has 9 calories per gram, and carb and protein only have 4.” Which is true, but that doesn’t mean that fat automatically causes weight gain, or that weight gain is bad, or that fat is unhealthy. These are oversimplifications of complex concepts.

Really quick, let’s talk about your body fat and why it’s important. Body fat, or adipose tissue, has several important jobs in your body:

• Provides a stored source of energy
• Keeps you warm
• Provides protection for your body
• Part of the structure of your cell membranes
• Secretes hormones – especially estrogen
• Protects your heart and your bones
• Your brain is made almost entirely of fat

If you don’t have enough body fat, your bones will start to break down and you can develop osteoporosis, it can cause cardiac problems, infertility, impair your immune system, delay wound healing, and puts you at risk of complications during surgery. Isn’t it interesting how this is almost never talked about. We hear CONSTANTLY about all the risks of being at a higher weight, or of having a lot of body fat. But we act as if there’s no such thing as too little. (That’s anti-fat bias, folks. It’s everywhere.)

Now you’re probably wondering, “But Katy, aren’t there also risks of having too much body fat?” 

Yes, there are risks that come with that too. You might have seen recently some headlines about how they’re trying to replace the BMI with measuring waist circumference instead because the idea is that measuring belly fat is a better indicator of health than BMI. Which very well may be true, but it still leaves us with the question of what is a person supposed to do about that? We can’t control how our bodies carry our weight, and we can’t spot reduce body fat, and we know that dieting doesn’t work. So does focusing on fat loss help us? I’d argue it’s really not that different than our fixation on weight loss in general – it’s been counterproductive. 

Anway, the key takeaway here is that body fat is different from dietary fat, and you need to have body fat. It’s a good thing. Yes, a high percentage of body fat does correlate with certain health conditions, but focusing on losing body fat isn’t a super helpful goal. There are a LOT of ways we can improve health without going down the rabbit hole of dieting and weight loss or fat loss as a fixation. 

Now, let’s talk about fat in your food…

Fat in food serves a lot of important functions:

• Provides energy in the form of calories
• Makes food taste good
• Aids in the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients (vitamins A, D, E, K)
• Provides texture to food
• Keeps food from sticking to the pan
• Helps transfer heat in food when cooking
• Emulsifies or thickens sauces
• Helps baked goods rise and become tender and flaky
• Helps with satiety and keeping you full

How much fat do we need?

One of the things we learned from the low-fat era was that at the population level, humans appear to function best when about 20-35% of our daily calories come from fat. (Does this mean that I want you to calculate your daily calories and then figure out the percentage you’re getting from fat – ABSOLUTELY NOT.)

The reason I’m sharing this is to help you understand what the research shows, because we stand by science around here, and to help you appreciate that you probably need more fat than you think you do from food.

If you’re eating something like dry toast and egg whites for breakfast, don’t you think it’s going to taste better, be more satisfying, stick with you longer and provide you with more nutrients if you eat it with some fat, such as having avocado toast with a whole egg, or scrambled eggs and toast with butter? 

When our food is more satisfying because it tastes good, we are less likely to keep on eating just because we’re chasing satisfaction. And when our food has enough fat in it to stick with us longer (because fat is the most slowly digested of the 3 macronutrients), then we don’t get hungry again as quickly. 

If you eat some pretzels as a snack, those aren’t going to fill you up and keep you satisfied as long as if you had those pretzels with some peanut butter or hummus, right? (And yes, the PB and hummus would also have some protein in them too, but they’re also a good source of fat.) Or if you had a fat-free yogurt vs a full fat yogurt, which one tastes better, has a more satisfying texture and sticks with you longer? The one with fat in it. 

What About Healthy Fats vs Unhealthy Fats?

You’ve probably also heard the terms “healthy fats” and “unhealthy fats.” I’m going to let you guess how I feel about these terms. I’m not a fan.

I think any time with food or nutrition that we are creating these B&W labels, it is first of all inaccurate and lacks nuance, and it also creates unnecessary stress in our relationship with food. 

When you hear the terms “healthy/unhealthy” fats, what they are usually referring to is unsaturated fats vs saturated fats.

I’m going to try not to get too nerdy here, because I did my master’s degree thesis on omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and the risk of breast cancer, so I could easily go down a rabbit hole here that we don’t need to go down. I want you to understand that I do certainly appreciate the differences between various types of fat and the impact on health. 

I want us to be able to think about this in a way that is actually helpful for both your health and your relationship with food.

It’s actually really hard to conduct scientific research on the types of fat that people consume and to correlate it with health conditions. Most of the time when you’re studying nutrition, you’re asking people self-report questions about what they eat, and it’s hard to quantify that and get good data. If you asked me how often do I eat tomatoes, I’d have to guess that I eat them every couple of weeks, usually more in the summer when they’re in season and I’m eating things like BLT’s, but then I’d start to think about how tomatoes are also in pasta sauce and soups and salsa, and now I have no idea how often I eat tomatoes. 

So then sometimes they’ll have people track what they’re eating for a period of time, but there are problems with this approach too. What we know about human behavior is that when we know we have to write it down, most of us will either eat differently than usual, or we will write it down inaccurately (whether we are lying or misrepresenting what we ate, or we are just under or overestimating the amount of something), it’s very hard to get super precise data. 

That’s why we have to appreciate that nutrition research when we are talking about health and disease is not as precise as we’d like to believe. 

And of course, each person’s body is different, and just because something is good public health advice, doesn’t mean it’s what YOU and YOUR body need to follow.

Back to the idea of healthy vs unhealthy fats.

Generally speaking, unsaturated fats are considered “healthy” fats because they have anti-inflammatory properties, which can help protect against disease. So this would include things like oils, avocados, nuts, fatty fish like salmon or tuna, olives, and things like that. 

Saturated fats and trans fats are what they call “unhealthy” fats. There is pretty good data that trans fats aren’t good for us, which is why the FDA banned partially hydrogenated oils that create trans fats from our food supply. So that’s really not something you need to be paying attention to our worrying about anymore.

When it comes to saturated fat, that typically comes from animal sources like high fat meats (like sausage, bacon, steak, high fat ground beef, any higher fat cuts of meat), as well as full fat dairy products like cream, butter, sour cream, cream cheese, regular cheese and things like that. 

There was a review article published in 2020 suggesting that the research isn’t as conclusive as we once thought it was on saturated fat and health. Some studies have shown that saturated fat doesn’t have an impact on heart health, and there have been calls from the scientific community for the recommendations from public health organizations about saturated fat and cardiovascular health to be reevaluated. 

Am I saying that you should just have a free-for-all with saturated fat? Or with fat in general? No. I’m saying that thinking of fat as good/bad or healthy/unhealthy isn’t really an accurate way of thinking about it. It’s more complicated than that, and what we do know for sure is that we need fat from our food, and we need fat on our bodies. Let’s stop treating fat like it’s a bad word.

How to Approach Fat Within Your Intuitive Eating Journey

My recommendation here is to think of it without specificity. You don’t need to be measuring or quantifying your fat intake. All you need to do is be intentional about including fat with your meals and snacks.

The way I teach this to my clients and the students in my programs is when you’re making yourself a plate of food to make sure you have a decent amount of carb, protein and fat on that plate, especially at meals. So if you’re making a turkey sandwich and it just has meat and bread, I’d encourage you to add some cheese and mayo or avocado. Not only is it going to taste better, but it’s going to stick with you longer and help you absorb some of the fat-soluble nutrients. Plus, then you have those fatty acids for your body to make use of in terms of hormone production, repairing your cell walls, giving you healthy shiny hair and moist looking skin. It’s going to help your immune system function properly, wounds to heal, and your brain to be healthy. 

In particular, we know that omega-3 fatty acids are important for brain health (and also prevention of certain types of cancers, and they can help with triglyceride levels). So when you can include things like salmon, avocado or olive oil, that’s a nice way to practice some gentle nutrition if you like those foods.

For some people, if they eat a lot of saturated fat it can raise their cholesterol levels. If you have high cholesterol you could play around with swapping some of your saturated fat sources for unsaturated fat to see if it helps. (For me personally, I have high cholesterol, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference, but each person’s body responds differently and I’ve definitely had clients who did see improvements when they lowered their saturated fat intake and increased their unsaturated fat intake). 

If you find yourself worrying about fat, or feeling guilty about eating things high in fat, that’s an indicator that we need to do some of that mindset work on making peace with food and challenging the food police. It’s one thing to be empowered with an understanding of nutrition science and gentle nutrition, and it’s another thing to be stressed out and feeling guilty about the things you eat or don’t eat. 

Wrapping Up

Whew! We did it! That’s a wrap on today’s episode, and on our macronutrient series. I don’t do a ton of episodes that get into the weeds about nutrition on this podcast because I don’t want to fuel the diet mentality in that way, but if you liked these episodes and want me do to more on any aspect of nutrition, definitely let me know. I’m open to doing more nutrition-specific topics if that feels helpful to you, so shoot me a DM or and email if you have ideas or requests for episodes. 

Don’t forget to go check out the other macronutrient episodes on carbs and proteins so that you can have the full picture and an appreciation for how these 3 macronutrients all do different and important things for your body, and why it’s important that you’re including all of them and that we aren’t scapegoating any particular nutrient.

In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

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