posted on October 16th, 2012
Posted from the Sarah Wilson website
http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2012/10/which-fats-should-i-be-eating/
First, let’s acknowledge the information out
there is conflicted. More and more the scientists and chefs and wellness nuts
are agreeing: the fats we’ve been told to eat for the past 50 years – the
poly-unsaturated, so-called “vegetable” ones – are, in fact, the worst stuff we
can put in our bodies. And the fats we’ve been told to never touch – the
saturated ones – are actually the healthiest, safest and, in fact, are the
least “fattening” (if you’re not eating a sugar and carb-heavy diet while also
eating fat).
Learn more by reading my post on how the
science now shows saturated fatis good for us.
I’ve been following the debates for a bit, weighing
up what’s right. Here are some of the issues explained and a rundown on how I
eat my fat:
Some
science to get started:
Whether
a fat is safe to eat is based on two things:
- it’s smoke point (higher the better)
- it’s stability (the more
stable the better), which is determined by what kind of carbon, hydrogen
and oxygen bonds it has.
Smoke points
explained:
All fats are made up of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon but
arranged in different orders. Each carbon atom is bonded to two other carbon
atoms, and the more carbon atoms in a fatty acid, the longer it will be. Ergo
short and long chains.
Longchain fatty acids
= higher melting/smoke point
The more refined the oil, the higher the higher melt or
smoke point, which means the oil is much better for you. A fat is no longer
good for consumption after exceeding it’s smoke point, as it begins to break
down, and releases toxic fumes and free radicals. The longer it takes the oil
to smoke, the better.
Stability
explained:
Chains with carbon atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms = a
saturated fat (each carbon molecule is “saturated” with hydrogen) = more stable
= solid at room temperature.
Chains with has carbon bonded to only one hydrogen and
double bonded to another carbon = monounsaturated fat = not so stable = liquid
at room temperature.
Chains with has carbon bonded to only one hydrogen but with
several double bonds = a polyunsaturated fat = very unstable = liquid at room
temperature.
I mostly eat
saturated fat.
We are mostly made up of saturated fat. This is what we’re
meant to eat. Saturated fats are crucial for absorbing vitamins, calcium
uptake, immune function, and cell membrane structure. Eating the right
saturated fats lead to increased tolerance to the sun, skin issues like acne or
eczema clear up, drastically increased energy, absence of food cravings, and
peaceful sleep. And they can make you lose weight. Yes. That’s been my
experience since I’ve upped my saturated fat levels.
I eat meat fat (chicken skin and pork crackling) and lots of
coconut products.
I cook with bacon lard (left over from frying bacon), coconut
oil and ghee.
I eat a little monounsaturated fats.
These should never be heated to high temperatures as this
can cause breakdown and free radicals. Check out my chat with David Gillespie
on this here.
I eat (cold/unheated) olive
oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil.
I cook olive oil at medium temperatures
only (not frying).
However, I do cook with
macadamia oil (which has a very high smoke point).
I avoid
polyunsaturated fats.
These are the so-called vegetable oils, though they’re
actually from grains and beans. They go rancid easily and break down into free
radicals when heated.
Worse, most of these oils go through a hydrogenation process
to make them last as long as the saturated fats, but this very process makes them basically
unusable to the body, causing all kinds of health problems.
I don’t add omega oils!
We should be eating the omegas – Omega 6 (found in grains,
corn, and animals fed grains and corn, corn and soybean oil) and Omega 3 (found
in fish, nuts etc) in a 3:1 ratio. Sadly, most people today consume a ratio of
35:1. The fix to this issue? We’re told to eat Omega 3 supplements. As I
discuss with David Gillespie here, this is madness. It doesn’t work. Far better
to cut our Omega 6 intake instead.
Also, Omega 3 oils we’re told to eat,
like flaxseed, are very unstable and turn rancid fast. Although there does seem
to be some worth to the argument that Krill oil is a good way to go.
I personally don’t take
these supplements – I eat more fish and nuts and cut out the processed grains.
I don’t touch transfats!
These are unsaturated fats that have been turned into much
more dangerous fats by changing the placement of the hydrogen atoms in the
molecule. These fats are able to be absorbed by individual cells and mess up
the function of the cell.
I will eat sugar before I
eat transfats…which says a lot.
For some extra reading, you might
like to check out this great interview with the authors of a new book “WhyWomen Need Fat,” Steven J.C. Gaulin, an
evolutionary biologist, and William D. Lassek, a retired doctor of public
health at the University of Pittsburgh. It gives a cheery take on fat and the
differences between the ways women and men gain weight.
Some bits I liked:
Why women put on weight after a few
kids:
“Interestingly, human brain size
plays a big role in why women need fat and why they tend to gain weight after
having children. Humans have ridiculously big brains, which makes it more
difficult to give birth to our infants. While chimps, orangutans and gorillas
can literally sleep through a birth, human births, especially first births, are
typically more than a day of very difficult labor. Women tend to weigh less
before they have had their first baby because with a first infant,
evolutionarily, it pays not to grow a baby that is too large. They can get
stuck in the birth canal. It’s not so much of a problem for us in 21st-century
North America because most women have fairly ready access to cesarean section.
But for 99.99 percent of human evolution, it was a really big problem. The
result of natural selection is that women tend to be lighter before they have a
child because they need their first infant to be smaller in order to survive
childbirth. Each infant that a woman has remodels the pelvis so that each
subsequent infant can grow somewhat bigger. There is a positive correlation
between birth order and birth weight. So the way to grow a bigger infant is for
the mother to have more fat on her body.”
On the “polyunsaturated explosion”:
“Two people (exerted) a very big
influence on our national diet. One was coming from an economic perspective and
the other was coming from (what he believed) was a nutritional perspective.
After Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack, when the American public
became much more focused on heart health and nutrition, a popular nutritionist
by the name of Ansel Keys made a lot of impact. He was committed to the notion
that saturated fat was the culprit in the heart disease epidemic in the U.S. He
advised Americans to replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, in
particular corn and soybean oils. Meanwhile Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of
agriculture, had been tasked to get food prices lower. He decided to heavily
subsidize and commoditize corn and soybeans in order to make them really cheap.
So corn and soybeans became the basis of our entire food production system. And
it continues today. The amount of these oils in the American diet increases
significantly every year.
Why omega-6 is to blame for unnatural
fat gain
It’s not bad to eat grains, it’s not
bad to eat corn, and it’s not bad to eat soybeans. What is bad is that food
processors extract and concentrate these oils from plants. In an ear of corn
there isn’t that much corn oil, but when you subject it to industrial
processing and extract everything but the oil, now you’ve got a lot of omega-6.
It’s this heavy industrial processing of seed crops that makes our diet so
unnatural. Omega-6s make us fat in a variety of ways. They promote fat storage.
Omega-6 is also the precursor for certain signaling molecules called
endocannabinoids. Will likes to call them the body’s home-grown version of
marijuana. Endocannabinoids give you the munchies just like cannabis does. So
the omega-6s are telling the body, “Store the fat you have.” And they are also
telling the body, “Eat more, I’m hungry!
How to eat to not put on
weight:
Start eating the kind of diet that
drastically reduces the amount of polyunsaturated omega-6s in the diet. The best
way to do that is to stop eating processed food and to avoid commercially fried
foods because they are always fried in these omega-6 fats. Potato and corn
chips, for example, are a huge contributor of omega-6s in the diet. There is
more than a gram of omega-6 in every single potato chip that a person eats.
Click on each to get a copy of I Quit Sugar Cookbook and I Quit Sugar book. Both are Kindle Editions.
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