As anyone who has ever struggled to lose weight knows, the body is very good at making its own fat, which it stores most prominently on the hips, thighs and around the waist. That’s because your body can, given the right conditions, convert sugar into fat, even if you follow a totally fat-free diet. Your body stores about 80 percent of the fat you consume. Ideally, you burn off most of this reserved energy by staying physically active. If not the fat you eat becomes the fat that makes your clothes too tight and endangers your health. However, about 20 percent of the fat in your diet is not stored. Instead, your body puts it to work , since an astonishing variety of tissues and biological processes require a daily infusion of fat. Without fat, your skin and hair would look dull and dry. And more importantly, dietary fats allow your body to absorb the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Every cell in your body needs fat to build a healthy protective membrane. Fat also provides the raw materials that your body uses to produce chemicals that control the blood pressure, prevent blood clots and regulate the body’s response to injury and infection.
Replacing some of the calories that come from saturated fats with the calories from unsaturated fats may be even better for you than replacing them with carbohydrate calories. Studies show that swapping saturated fat in your diet for processed, carbohydrate-rich foods, such as white rice, pasta, has only modest effect on heart disease rick. On the other hand, US researchers studies that diet of 80,000 nurses for 14 years and determined that replacing just 5 percent of calories from saturated fat with an equal amount of good fat may reduce the risk of heart disease by 42 percent. It’s not just your heart that benefits from these good fats, but these unsaturated fats can also fight an impressive range of other diseases.
However, human body can not make some types of fatty acids – the building blocks of fat, that are essential to health. That’s why your diet must include the aptly names essential fatty acids, which come primarily from fish and plat oils, and fall into the broader category of polyunsaturated fats. Meanwhile, you can live without eating mono-saturated fats, which form the other major category of unsaturated fat – but mounting research suggests that you may not live as long or as well as people who do consume these other good fats regularly.
The Chemistry of Good Fats
Chemical structure distinguishes the good fats (unsaturated fats) from the saturated fats. Details get very technical, but a simplified explanation may help you understand how they work in your body. All fat molecules are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and mono-unsaturated are missing a pair, while poly-unsaturated fats lack two or more pairs. These differences, among other chemical attributes, affect the appearance of a fat and influence how it behaves inside your body. Saturated fat tends to be solid at room temperature, while unsaturated fats remain oils once they are liberated from the fish, nuts, seeds and other foods they come from.
Mono-unsaturated Fats
Scientific trails, such as the Lyon Diet Heart Study, found that eating so-called Mediterranean diet appears to protect the cardiovascular system more effectively than a typical low-fat one. The cornerstone of a traditional Mediterranean diet is olive oil, one of nature’s richest sources of mono-unsaturated fat.
In fairness, some of the wonders of the olive oil may have been over-hyped by the cooking oil industry. After all, the traditional Mediterranean diet also includes frequent servings of fruit ad vegetables as well as plenty of fish. But it is hard to ignore the fact that people in this study who ate a Mediterranean type diet consumed plenty of fat, much of it in the form of monounsaturated fatty acids in the olive oil, yet they had four times fewer heart attacks than people asked to eat standard low-fat diet.
Olive oil isn’t the only excellent sources of mono-unsaturated fat already in your pantry. Nuts are packed with the mono-unsaturated fats, too, so add nuts including unprocessed peanut butter, to your shopping list. And the green flesh of an avocado contains nearly as many grams as a fatty hamburger, but the fat is mostly mono-unsaturated.
Poly-unsaturated Fats
Fish oil is the best for Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) – two of the beneficial omega-3 fatty acids that have been associated with a large number of health benefits. Eating seafood, especially fatty fish, is your best option for getting omega-3 fatty acids, as the fat cells that protect all marine creatures from cold water is packed with omega-3 fatty acids. Choose the fattiest fish, such as sardines and salmon, since more oil means more healthy omega-3s, as opposed to the lean cuts of beef and pork you should choose. Canned herring or tuna are other good choices, as are trout, mullet and anchovies. Avoid taking cod-liver oil even if you can stand the taste; the recommended dose may contain toxic levels of vitamins A and D.
If you don’t eat fish, there are other ways to put these fats to work in your body. Fish-oil capsules are one option, though you should talk to your doctor before taking them, if you are already taking blood thinning medication such as warfarin. Walnuts, Walnut oil, Canola, Linseed and Linseed oil won’t give you exactly the same kind of omega-3s, but they do supply a type of fat called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which your body can turn into EPA and DHA.
Generally less well-known than the omega-3s are the omega-6 fatty acids., which are the kind of fat you find in most margarines and vegetable oils. You need some of these to supply essential fatty acids, but most of us consume more than we need. By the way, all fats and oils contain a blend of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. But any given fat or oil tends to have a higher concentration of one particular type.
For example 62 percent of the fat in butter is saturated, while 29 percent is monounsaturated and almost no polyunsaturated fat. But, in olive oil, only 14 percent of the fat is saturated, 74 percent is monounsaturated and 8 percent is polyunsaturated. Canola oil contains about 7 percent saturated fat, 60 percent monounsaturated fat and 30 percent is polyunsaturated fat.
