Just the Tips: Fats
While it’s not my favorite subject, I do think that I’ve saved the best for last. I think fat is where the majority of people agree — fats are incredible. Fat is rich, juicy, filling, and indulgent. Fat drips with succulence and holds flavor so well.
Shortly, fat’s where it’s at, yo.
For the majority of my life fat, dietarily speaking, has had a very bad reputation. It’s been known to be a necessary evil but has been the scapegoat of the hackneyed “okay in moderation line” until relatively recently. Looking with a slightly more nuanced lens, I can see moments in my history where fat begin to gain more ground as a staple of our diets — things like the Milk campaigns or the Atkins diets of the mid to late 90’s. Overwhelmingly though, fat has been something we’ve been told to minimize for the past two decades.
The reasoning feels quite simple. Fat makes you fat. And being fat means being unhealthy which means you’re dying faster. So, with minimal effort, fat food gets connected to our fear of death; it’s so easy a kid could sell it.
That’s reductive and unkind.
Fat is healthy. And not to beat a dead horse, but “okay in moderation” almost gets the idea. Fat is necessary for a balanced diet and regular bodily function. Just like anything else, there’s too much, but we’ve been sold some falsehoods about fat that I’d love to help rectify.
Scientifically, fat is the most calorie-rich of the three major macronutrients in our diet. We get 9 calories from every gram of fat we ingest, which is about twice as much as we get from either protein or carbs (4 cals/gram each). This alone means that we should be additionally mindful of moderating our fat intake, algebraically it’s just not equivalent to our intake for carbs or proteins.
Beyond a basic understanding, there’s also different types of fat — saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated. Physically, you’ll be able to tell the difference between saturated and unsaturated fats in that the former will be mostly solid at room temperature while unsaturated fats will mostly be liquid. That said, unsaturated fats are things like fish oil, palm oil, peanut oil, and on and on; the idea here being that most of these fats are still found in solid foods. Meanwhile, most saturated fats are things like the gristle on steak, or the fat found in chicken skin, but milk fat is about 60–70% saturated fat, so it’s more about being mindful. The solid/liquid divide is a good rule of thumb but isn’t an absolute, mostly because if we’re eating “natural” food that has been minimally processed, there’s going to be a combination of saturated and unsaturated fats in everything. Furthermore, both fats are necessary, though more and more medical studies show that it’s better to favor unsaturated fats, at least a little.
Rule Eight — Make sure to get a diverse set of fats in your diet, and favor minimally processed fats that would be liquid at room temperature a bit more.
If you’re a fan of feeding labels and facts, you may be wondering “isn’t there another fat to consider?”
Yes, there is.
Take a gander at nutritional facts, and you’ll find saturated and “trans” fat separately. These days, trans fats have become notorious and should really be the focus of “okay in moderation,” because the majority of trans fats we ingest are artificial. They’re from oils (which can be healthy, unsaturated fats) that have been chemically altered to be solid at room temperature, the way that saturated fats are. A very common example of this is margarine; it’s very high in trans fat, and definitely not a ‘natural’ product.
Given the relative ease of production and efficiency of growing plants versus raising cattle, not only do we see trans fats in products like margarine and shortening, those exact products then become go-to ingredients for producing the fats we see in store-bought sweets and snacks. The integration of trans fat throughout the American snack-tivity lifestyle was swift and a little insidious if you ask me.
These days, we’re much more aware of the effect that trans fats have on our health. Countless medical studies have shown that diets high in trans fats are strongly correlated with heart disease and poor health, which has seen a rise since the industrialization of trans fats. Before that time, the major source of trans fats was in red meat, like from beef, goat, or lamb. For the average adult, it’s a healthy idea to stay below 5 to 6 grams of trans fat per day. Really, the lower the better, because we have little to no evidence of any health benefits from trans fat.
Rule Nine — Avoid trans fats by reducing the amount of processed fats and red meat you eat.
Now we know so much more about fats than before, but I still haven’t talked about WHY we need fats. For our health, fats serve a few key purposes:
- Fat provides a soluble media for several necessary vitamins and minerals.
- Fat is our source of energy storage in the body.
- Fat helps keep heat in to maintain temperature.
- Fats in the diet do help with passing indigestible dietary fiber (though again in moderation because too much fat causes the same constipation).
Rule Ten — Focus on fat as a necessary part of the diet, not something to indulge in.
It’s this last piece that should resonate loudest, because it’s essentially repeating Rule One. Food is fuel for nourishing our body. It becomes unhealthy when we treat it unhealthily. With few exceptions, just developing a healthier relationship with fat will allow us to become healthier overall, and appreciate the food more for what it gives us. The healthier relationship has already begun, because you’ve gone through the trouble of reading this; moving forward it’s about practicing these ideas in your own diet.
The short of it is
Eat minimally processed fat from white meat, seafood, nuts and vegetables, and avoid processed fat as much as possible.
That covers it for fat. Next time, I’ll do a wrap up and analysis, so stay tuned.
Sincerely Not Fat (anymore),
August
