What Really Makes You Fat?

written by

Susan Blasko

posted on

January 28, 2025

Many who struggle with excess weight try to lose weight by limiting their fat intake, thinking that consuming fat is what makes them fat. 

But as they soon discover, it’s not that simple.

Excess fat storage in the body is primarily the result of consuming excess carbohydrates and proteins. This is another way of saying it’s a result of not consuming enough fats. 

Why?

Because excess carbs and proteins are converted into fat. 

The best way to prevent conversion in your own body is to adjust your intake of these three macronutrients - fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. You need all of them, and they need to be in balanced proportions.

We are all unique individuals. However, some general principles can be applied as guidelines from which to implement a healthful macronutrient ratio. 

The Nutritional Therapy Association recommends 40% carbohydrate, 30% fat, and 30% protein.

Before you get carried away, let's look at what these micronutrients actually are.

By "carbohydrates", I mean mostly vegetables and fruits instead of starchy carbs. 

Cabbage, tomatoes, apples, celery, green beans, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber, eggplant, berries, zucchini, spinach, kale, chard, and collards — these and other fruits and vegetables are non-starchy carbs. 

Starchy carbs include potatoes and root vegetables, beans, and grains.

For weight loss, refined carbs should be avoided altogether. These include white bread, pizza, bagels, pasta, cookies, cake, candy, white sugar, refined cereals, muffins, soda, potato chips, and packaged foods containing white flour and/or white sugar.

Fats that help you to lose weight include lard (from forested pigs like the ones we raise at Polyface), butter or ghee (from 100% grass-fed cows), chicken schmaltz (from pastured chickens), beef tallow (from 100% grass-fed beeves), duck fat, lamb fat (from 100% grass-fed lamb), olive oil, and coconut oil. Coconut oil is a special case (I’ll dedicate another blog to extoll the virtues of raw coconut oil).

A few oils to stay clear of include bottled nut oils or avocado oil. They are extremely fragile and turn rancid almost immediately upon exposure to air. 

Processors deodorize these oils to remove the unpleasant smell and taste of rancidity. Nut oils and avocado oil are nutritious if you obtain the oil by consuming the nuts and avocados themselves. The oil is protected inside the nuts and fruit and can be ingested before it has a chance to become rancid.

Also avoid corn, cottonseed, soy, and canola oils, even if they’re designated 'organic'. These polyunsaturated industrially processed oils are unhealthful for many reasons that cannot be covered in a short blog post. 

They are found in commercial salad dressings, soups, sauces, gravy, butter substitutes (margarine, spreads), mayonnaise, chips, crackers, breads, etc. You will find a few exceptions, such as chips that are fried in lard, and breads containing butter or olive oil instead of soy or canola. This is when reductionist shopping (i.e., reading labels) is required.

Butter is delicious on almost anything. And, if it’s from 100% grass-fed cows, it won’t burn when you cook with it like conventional butter does. 

Greens sautéed in butter, dressed with lemon juice and liquid aminos, make a nutritious side dish for a meal. 

The calcium in the greens  requires the presence of fat and acid in order to release and assimilate it. 

Another delicious combination that achieves this goal is greens sautéed in bacon fat and dressed with a splash of raw apple cider vinegar. Next time you fry some Polyface bacon, simply save the fat by pouring it into a small bowl or jar. The sediment will sink to the bottom, and you'll be left with a beautiful cooking oil for eggs or veggies. Store it in your fridge and use it up.

Saturated animal fats from properly raised animals will help you shed extra pounds that come from consuming excess carbohydrates and proteins. 

So consume the healthy ones and eliminate the unhealthy ones, and you’ll easily lose any excess that you might be carrying around. As your body finds its healthy balance, you'll notice other changes, too.

You’ll notice changes in immune function, hormone synthesis, and insulin metabolism. Good-bye diabetes, infertility, and allergies. 

May you be deeply nourished!

Susan

More from the blog

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion:  "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition.   That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit.  As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished.  This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer.  You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test.   We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats.  They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not.   We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets:  you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question.  But I'd like to explore it a bit further.   Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history.  The planet is awash in food.   Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way.  We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle.  When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe.  Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory.  Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory.   As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet.  Soil is the skin of the earth.  When it goes, famine results.   The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around.   Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore?  Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough.   The soil trajectory does not look good.  But at Polyface, we're building soil.  Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them.  That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases.   The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century.  At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years.  Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down.  What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff.  By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it.  Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry.  This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before.   African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas.  Why?  We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals.  Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency.  Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease.  Nature uses disease to cull the weak.  Predators pick off the stragglers.  This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point:  the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day.  Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated.  We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children.   Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money.  It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that.  Thank you.  Let's heal the land together. Joel