Almost all diets make you fat.
Unbelievable and hard-to-believe fat facts.
Fats are an essential part of our diet – essential in significant quantities. Popular nutritionists often refer to good fats and bad fats but just where the boundary lies between the good and the bad depends on prejudice, ignorance, fashion and tradition, as much as it does on science.
But first of all we have to determine: what is fat? There are three aspects to fats:
1. dietary fats – the fats we eat
2. body fat – which are of two basic kinds – the fats that are an integral part of our cells, our brains, our organs
3. the excess body fat that is unwanted and which many people want to remove from their body.
This page focuses on the fats we eat and the fats that are a vital part of us.
The fats we eat fall into three categories based on their molecular structure, categories which also reflect, generally, their nutritional role: saturated fats, monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats.
Saturated fats are most prominent in eggs and red meat and are often described as bad by people who prefer black-and-white certainty to the complexity of reality. The amounts of saturated fats in the diet would be not only tolerable, they would be health-giving. What is more, the lipid profile of wild animals is healthier as food for humans than the flesh mass-produced by modern agriculture. Saturated fats include butter, lard and the predominant fats in cheese and fatty meat.
Monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) are most prominent in food from plants. They are the predominant fats in the Mediterranean diet in which olive oil is a main component. Avocadoes, macadamias and almonds are also good sources of MUFAs. Monounsaturated fats are generally liquid at room temperature and turn cloudy if refrigerated.
Polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) come from both plant and animal sources. The story of how fats manufactured from polyunsaturated vegetable oils replaced saturated fats in manufactured foods with the aid of political clout, and an uncritical medical profession is told in the study called The Oiling of America by Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. and Sally Fallon (originally published in Nexus Magazine in two parts, Nov/Dec 1998 and Feb/Mar 1999, see the link below). Big companies, government agencies and medical organizations have campaigned against cholesterol, meat, eggs, butter and other traditional foods, leading to huge profits from sales of potentially more harmful margarine, refined foods and trans-fatty acid products. The study contradicts that public health policy was suppressed and censored from publication for many years.
The significance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats
Within the PUFAs omega-3 and omega-6 fats are found. Both omega-3 and omega-6 are essential to human health, and cannot be manufactured within the human body. An excess of omega-6 fats increases your risk of heart disease and certain forms of cancer; it also aggravates inflammatory and auto-immune diseases. Although cereal grains have a low proportion of fats among their three macronutrients, they are generally consumed in relatively large quantities and so their omega-3 and omega-6 ratio becomes significant for health outcomes. Omega-3s are produced in blue-green algae and in green leafy plants and grasses, as well as in the meat of the animals (including fish, eggs and dairy products) that eat this vegetation. People should therefore eat fresh greens, fish and grass-fed meat. Grain-fed meat (including eggs and some farmed fish) has a much greater proportion of omega-6.
Please note: consider your total diet in the context of your health, your level and type of activity. Consider taking supplements of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA from fish oil to restore some quality to the degraded food products available commercially.
Diet Making You Fat - It is the fact, hard to believe
More about saturated fat, profiles, examples, association with diseases: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat.
Monounsaturated fat – molecular description, relation to health, natural sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monounsaturated_fat.
Polyunsaturated fat – benefits, relation to cancer: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyunsaturated_fat.
The UPHS Nutrition Care Guide – Fats in your Diet: www.pennmedicine.org/health_info/nutrition/fat.html.
The Oiling of America: www.drcranton.com/nutrition/oiling.htm.