A Tale of Two Fats
Jun 25th, 2007 by Kaiser
All fats are not the same! This fact has been beaten to death in the media and I’m sure everyone knows it by now. But are you practicing it - are you really making a conscious effort to include healthy, essential fats as part of your diet every single day? If you’re not, you’re overlooking a key aspect of your health and energy.
In mankind’s early days, the healthy omega-3’s,6’s, and 9’s found in seeds, fish-oil, and nuts where an abundant part of their diet. Today, its the unnatural saturated fat that has become a major part of our diets, with essential fats almost absent from most people’s plates.
In keeping track of my eating in a journal recently, I’ve been able to notice relationships between what I eat and how I feel and perform in the gym. After noticing a huge drop in strength last week, where I found myself squatting nearly 50 pounds less than the previous week’s numbers, I went to the journal to find out what could be the cause. After taking a close look, it was right there: I had inadvertently cut out all the healthy fats from my diet. I had been eating fried egg-whites in olive-oil and including power-peanut butter in all my oatmeal in previous weeks, giving me about 40 grams of healthy fat a day. However, I suddenly stopped both habits for an entire week. It didn’t take long for the absence of this healthy source of energy and important biological cofactor to show it’s effects. The sudden drop in calories from this source must also have played a role in the loss of strength.
We’ve all been taught about the negative effects of fat; how fat is full of calories, and how easily it is converted to body-fat. And yes for saturated and trans fats, that’s all true. If you want to gain unhealthy weight, kill you energy and mood, and wreak havoc on your body, saturated and trans fat are the way to do it. I challenge you to eliminate them COMPLETELY for a week and report back to me on how you feel.
But there are other types of fat that play an important role in proper metabolism and digestion, and those are the monounsaturated and poly-unsaturated fats. True, they are high in calories, but they have so many biological purposes that unless you really overeat them, they won’t harm you.
All the fat in your diet should be coming from mono- and poly- unsaturated fat; and ideally a source of healthy fat should be a part of every meal you eat. They key is going to be finding easy ways to incorporate them into your normal meals. For me, that means cooking in 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil, using power-peanut butter with my oatmeal, and taking fish-oil and flax seed oil pills every day.
Here’s a list of the different types of fat, both good and bad, and where they can be found:
Monounsaturated fat can be found in olives, olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, cashews, almonds, peanuts, and most other nuts and avocados. Polyunsaturated fat can be found flax, soybean, safflower, and cottonseed oils, and fish such as salmon, anchovies, and herring.
Saturated can be found in whole milk, butter, cheese, and ice cream, red meat, chocolate, coconuts, coconut milk, and coconut oil; trans fat in most margarines, vegetable shortening, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, deep-fried chips, many fast foods, and most commercial baked goods.
I challenge all of you to find a way to incorporate healthy fat as a staple in your diet. Unlike other suggestions on supplementation that are supposed to be good for you but you rarely ever really “feel”, this is one change that should have an immediate positive effect!
