Eating a Low-Fat Diet Makes You Crave Bad foods

When you eat a low-calorie, low-fat, high-carb diet, you want to eat more and eat higher-calorie and higher-carb foods. Higher-carb foods make you crave even more carbs.

In an experiment on a group of school children, scientists tested the effects of fat and carbs on eating behavior by giving kids either cheese wedges or potato chips. The kids were told they could eat as much as they wanted. Both groups were equally hungry at the start of the study. Based on the idea that you will gain more weight if you eat more fat-rich foods, like cheese, which contains more calories per gram of food, the cheese-eating kids should have consumed more calories. Eat more calories (because fat is more calorie dense), gain more weight. But it doesn’t work that way. If carbs drive you to overeat, the potato chip group should have eaten more calories. What happened? The kids in the potato chip group ate three times as many calories as the kids in the cheese group!

When we combine foods that are high in nutrients, we naturally eat less, even with hungry fat cells. The key here is that nutrient-dense foods (real whole foods) are satisfying while processed empty foods (nutrient-poor foods) are less satisfying, even though they may contain more calories.

This is consistent with a review of research on carb consumption in kids showing that kids who ate more carbs ate more food and were overall hungrier. If you eat a lot of carbs, you are hungrier and take in more overall food and calories in a day than if you eat fat.

When taken as a whole, the science shows us a clear pattern of evidence that carbs make you fat, while fat makes you thin. Foods like white rice, potatoes and sugary beverages promote obesity and related diseases. Fat (and calorie-rich) foods, like nuts, oily fish and olive oil and even foods high in saturated fats, promote weight loss and reduce risk of these diseases when you cut out the sugar and refined carbs.