The croissant diet or how I eliminated my spare tire by eating croissants using the six scariest words in the English language: saturated fat, insulin resistance, and free radicals.
The Croissant Diet
While researching for the series “The ROS Theory of Obesity,” I came across Valerie Reeves’s thesis via a post from Hyperlipid. She fed a group of mice a diet with an even split of carbohydrates and fat and relatively low protein. Most of the fat was stearic acid, a long-chain saturated fat that is most common in beef fat, cocoa butter, and dairy fat. The mice fed this diet became very lean, but in particular, they had very little abdominal fat and more lean mass compared to mice fed a high starch diet or mice fed a diet high in oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat found in olive oil.
The diet was described like this:
The line labeled “40% kcal stearic acid” shows the macronutrient composition of the diet that produced the lean mice – about 18% protein with 40 percent fat and 42% carbohydrate, with most (85%) of the fat being stearic acid.
