“So, you’re suggesting I eat nuts, seeds, olive oil, whole fat milk and yoghurt, salmon, sardines, avocados, eggs, and even butter,” a client recently asked me. “But I can’t shake my fear of fat. Is eating fat bad for me? Isn’t it going to make me gain weight – the very thing I’m trying to avoid!” If you think that eating fat is bad and it’s going to lead to weight gain, your ambivalence is understandable but let me put your mind at ease.
Is eating fat bad?
FAT! That four letter word…we hate.
For the past four decades we have been urged to banish it from our diets wherever possible. The recommendation was to switch to low-fat foods.
But this shift hasn’t made us healthier or thinner, probably because we also cut out the healthy fats as well as the potentially harmful ones.
But, don’t be scared of fat. You actually need it in your diet.
Fats have been given a bad name, but they are an important part of our diet. I promise you – good quality healthy fats will not make you put on weight. The fat you eat is not the fat you wear (unless it fat from deep fried stuff).
Mono and polyunsaturated fats (such as the list of foods I suggested to my client above) are excellent sources of essential fatty nutrients. They play a very important role in maintaining healthy skin and hair, regulating body temperature, supporting the immune system, insulating internal organs, nerve transmission, vitamin and mineral absorption, and hormone production.
Just like petrol and diesel are both fuels that cars can run on. If you put gas in a diesel engine or the other way around, the engine may run but it won’t run well, or it won’t run for a long.
Similar to cars, the human body functions well on a range of fats in combination with carbohydrates and protein, but it runs much better on some types of fat, compared to others. For example, the fat component of your say your lunch, is really important for the absorption of fat soluable vitamins (vitamins A, D, E & K) that are hopefully present in your lunch. If no fat is included in your lunch at all, the vitamins from your lunch won’t be absorbed into your blood stream as easily.
Healthy fats don’t make you “fat” – excess calories make you “fat”. It’s about getting the balance right.
Not all fats are created equal. The not so healthy fats include industrial made trans fats. Saturated fats fall somewhere in between. There is now some quality evidence to suggest that saturted fats such as butter, is perhaps not as bad for us as we once thought.
Trans fats are found in everything from commercially baked biscuits and pastries, to fast-food French fries. Eating foods rich in trans fats increases the amount of harmful LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream and reduces the amount of beneficial HDL cholesterol.
So, is eating fat bad for you? What about all the talk of it leading to heart disease? The research tells us this: Numerous meta-analyses and systematic reviews of both the historical and current literature reveals that the diet-heart hypothesis was not, and still is not, supported by the evidence. There appears to be no consistent benefit to all-cause or CVD (cardiovascular disease) mortality from the reduction of dietary saturated fat.
As I always say, the poison is in the dose no matter if that’s fats, sugar or carbs etc. So most things, including butter, is a good option to include in your diet. You gotta love fats because with 9k/Cal per gram, eating halthy fats will also help to keep you fuller and siatiated for longer. Meaning you may eat less throughout the day. So maybe fat isn’t that bad afterall. Eating healthy fats is actually GOOD for your health, weight and body.
If you’re on the low-fat train, it’s time to jump off! If you need help with that, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me here>>
