I Had a e- mail from Margaret Wilde asking if I would post her article on, my blog as I had reproduced one of her articles before it is a very interesting one. As was the last one I posted, which was called obesity and the salt connection. You can read that particular article on her site. Enjoy this one it raises some very interesting points.

Fat Retention

You will probably already have read my assertion that it is fluid retention that is the cause/initiator of obesity. You may have disagreed with me and wondered what is my explanation for the fat retention which is certainly present in many – possibly most – overweight and obese people. – Here it is: – but it is complicated and you will need to stick with me as I explain!

It had been clear to me for many years that the calorie explanation for obesity (eating too many calories and not taking much exercise – i.e. greed plus laziness) must be wrong because many – probably most – people can eat as much as they like and not become overweight, even if they take very little exercise. – They are what I call on my website ‘the lucky people’. – They are the slim people. – They are the people who have healthy veins and kidneys and are not sensitive to salt. They simply excrete in the urine any excess salt and its attendant water, so they do not gain weight by fluid retention.

I realised intuitively that the reason they do not put on excess weight when they overeat is that they simply excrete any excess fat/calories they eat. (Faeces tend to contain a lot of fat/calories, which is why animal dung is used as fuel in many countries.) But I did not know the mechanism that caused the fat excretion in slim people and the fat retention in fatter people, though I did guess that it probably involved minerals in the diet, because people with fluid retention tend to be deficient in calcium, magnesium and potassium.

Then BBC2 showed a series of programmes called “The Truth About Food” and I learnt about some Danish research which throws light, on this see.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/slim/calcium.shtml where you will read: “a high calcium intake increases the excretion of fat in the faeces”. – There was the necessary information! – In fact, the researchers found that twice as much fat was excreted on a high calcium intake as on a low calcium intake – and this was independent of calorie intake. – They also found that dairy calcium (they suggest low fat yoghurt) is a particularly good source for this extra calcium.

Similarly, on http://www.vitamins-nutrition.org/vitamins/calcium.html you can read: “Calcium helps keep the weight off. Research suggests that if you don’t get enough calcium in your diet, you’re likely to be overweight.”

And on http://www.foodsolutions.eu.com/pastissue/article.asp?art=26677&issue=163 it says, “Although the contribution of the different mechanisms to the overall anti-obesity effect of calcium is not clear, there is much evidence from animal and human studies, that a high-calcium diet and/or calcium supplementation decreases body weight and fat.”

On one of the links - http://www.vitamins-nutrition.org/vitamins/calcium.html- from the BBC’s The Truth About Food site, it says: “Calcium is the mineral most likely to be deficient in the average diet. Let me repeat that. Calcium is the mineral most likely to be deficient in the average diet. Calcium deficiency is a condition in which we fail to receive or to metabolize an adequate supply of Calcium.”

There are a number of reasons that overweight people in particular tend to be deficient in calcium. The main reason is that sodium retention/salt sensitivity/fluid retention depletes the body of calcium.

Here are two other very simple reasons:

1. Most fat people are ‘dieting’ most of the time – i.e. they are eating insufficient food for their body’s needs.

2. Fat people are routinely advised to limit their intake of dairy food like milk because their advisors (wrongly) believe that milk is ‘fattening’.

So to reduce fat retention, if it is present, the most important thing is to alter the diet to reduce the fluid retention which is the initiating cause of excess weight and the primary reason for fat people being short of calcium and for fat people ‘dieting’. That means reducing sodium intake and ensuring plenty of fruit and vegetables in the diet (because their high potassium content helps to displace sodium from the body).

And specifically it also means having a higher intake of calcium, especially, if possible, from a dairy source like low fat yoghurt. – It is also necessary to ensure sufficient vitamin D intake, as this is needed to metabolise the calcium. Insufficiency of vitamin D is quite common, as is widely reported, e.g. here - http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp

In my personal opinion it is neither necessary nor desirable to adopt a low fat diet. Low fat intake can be harmful, especially for small children.

Article By Margaret Wilde.

You can see more at her site http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk

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