I remember explaining to people a long time ago how low-fat diets were high in starch. Starch is nothing but sugar. All starch turns into sugar in the body.
So low-fat diets are high sugar diets, and therefore, low-fat diets must be bad.
However, I do not think that this is the case, I think that low-carb diets may actually not be optimal for human nutrition. I think you will be convinced of this too when you see this study.
So let’s look a the facts here.
Let’s take people that are very stressed.
People that are burned, that are in the hospital, immobilized because of terrible burns, are the definition of very stressed people.
Their bodies are healing from terrible trauma.
What better test of nutrition can there be then testing nutrition on people that are highly stressed?
So in this study, they actually tested diets based upon how quickly the burns healed and they found several interesting facts.
One is that burns healed much more quickly where the patients had a low fat, high carb diet.
That was a real surprise to most people today, who feel that low-carb diets are inherently better because they are low in sugar.
But this is not the case because the burn patients recovered much faster on a high carb diet than they did on high-fat diet
Patients on low-fat support had fewer cases of pneumonia: 3/24 vs 7/13 (p = .02), better respiratory and nutritional status, and shorter time to healing: 1.2 vs 1.8 days/% burned area
Let’s think about that for a second. They first discussed pneumonia.
Seven out of 13 patients on a conventional diet got pneumonia.
Pneumonia is a terrible threat to anybody in the hospital, but especially for people that are already highly stressed, immune compromised, burn victims.
The patients were getting plenty of carbohydrates got very few cases of pneumonia, only three out of 24.
That’s an enormous difference, think about how many fewer cases of pneumonia that is.
It is quite possible that even for people who are not burn victims, better nutrition in the form of more carbs could prevent pneumonia.
And then there was the time of healing. People on a carb rich diet healed one-third faster. That’s a huge difference if you’re sitting immobilized in the hospital with terribly painful burns.
And the second surprise (to the doctors anyway) involves fish oil
They gave some of the burn patients fish oil, and some they did not.
And the fish oil did not help to heal at all.
It may have even made it slower and worse. There was no improvement with fish oil.
Fish oil does not seem to add clinical benefit
This excellent study was done on people immobilized with terrible burns in the hospital, and highly stressed and immune compromised, is proof of two things:
Adequate carbohydrates speed up healing, and raise immunity, and
fish oil is not helpful, and may even be harmful.
Citations
Improved Clinical Status and Length of Care With Low-Fat Nutrition Support in Burn Patients
http://pen.sagepub.com/content/19/6/482.short
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