I don’t think that it’s just my imagination, but being lighter and eating our low-fat diet really seems to have helped all of us concentrate more easily and work harder. Experimental evidence supporting these anecdotal observations comes from Andrew Murray and his colleagues, who reported that only 10 days on a high-fat diet decreased endurance in treadmill running in rats by 35%. More importantly for those of us who make a living by thinking, the fat-eating rats also performed more poorly in a cognitive task, maze running. The results were described as a “high-fat hangover” by the editor of the publishing journal, FASEB.
Current government recommendations for diet suggest that fats make up only 20-35% of daily calories, so for me, that’s 20g or less. Considering that 1 oz of cheese has 6g, as does only 3 oz of ground beef, one cheeseburger a day would do the trick. By the way, this little pdf on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is really packed with good advice, and is worth a read on its own. I was surprised to learn that 45% of American adults completely abstain from alcohol. I guess my university setting is not a representative sample. The 2010 version is apparently in preparation. Hope they warn people against high fructose corn syrup in that version.
An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Food Amounts
