The most dreaded word in many dieter’s vocabulary is ‘fat’. It is not uncommon to hear a dieter discuss their avoidance of eating fat as if it were something thoroughly unwholesome, or even life-threatening, like an allergen, or a contagious disease. In one way, this impassioned hatred of fat is positive. It reflects a generally understood medical truth that overindulging in fat-rich foods often causes unwanted, and unhealthy, weight gain.
However, in another way, this fat-phobia is potentially dangerous, because awareness of fat is not enough; an understanding of how fat influences weight gain and overall health is required. Unfortunately, those who dread and avoid all fat “as a rule” are overlooking an important difference between saturated fat and unsaturated fat.
Saturated fat is often
real culprit when it comes to unwanted, and potentially unhealthy, weight gain. These types of fats, which are solid at room temperature, initiate production of LDL cholesterol, or “bad cholesterol”. In addition to weight gain, as cholesterol increases, so does risk of heart disease. In fact, saturated fats increase LDL cholesterol disproportionately more than dietary cholesterol itself; that is how powerfully bad it is to human body[i]. Dreading and avoiding this kind of fat is therefore quite intelligent.
Some dieters, however, are motivated less by concerns about high cholesterol and heart disease than they are about cosmetic weight gain. This is not a criticism; adverse health effects of excess weight are well documented, as are emotional traumas and social stigmas that tragically affect tens of millions of overweight people, especially children[ii].
Unquestionably, an excess intake of saturated fat is linked to weight gain. This is because a fat gram contains more than twice amount of calories as a protein gram – 9 calories versus 4 calories[iii]. As a result, dieters can eat more than twice as many protein grams as fat grams to achieve same amount of caloric intake. For dieters who are steadfastly watching every calorie, this 125% calorie difference between protein and fat can have an enormous impact.
Fat cells, once created, cannot be removed[1]; they can only be made smaller through body’s metabolic calorie-burning process[iv]. Since an individual’s rate of metabolism is determined largely by genetics, a dieter with a slower than average metabolism will spend months, perhaps even years longer struggling to shrink fat cells then would his or her metabolically-gifted counterpart[v].
It is quite easy to understand, based on above discussion, why very idea of fat is dreaded by dieters; both because of health hazards it poses, and its capacity to create excess fat cells. And it is just as easy to understand why many people are so afraid of consuming this kind of fat that they strive to remove all fat from their diet. This, however, is a large nutritional oversight.
Fat is a macronutrient that body requires for a number of important functions. Fat is a source of energy. It helps keep body warm, it aids in absorption of some vitamins, and helps regulate proper functioning of brain and nervous system[vi]. This appears, however, to be a contradiction.
On one hand there are health and weight gain hazards associated with fat, and on other hand, there are proven health benefits associated with fat. How can this be? The answer is easily understood when we differentiate between two types of fat: saturated and unsaturated. The kind of fat associated with health hazards is former; kind that body needs and uses effectively is latter.
There are two sub-types of unsaturated fat: polysaturated fat, and monosaturated fat. Popular foods that contain polysaturated fat include safflower oil and corn oil, while monosaturated fats are found in such foods as olive oil and peanut oil. These unsaturated fats are those that provide body with most useful and efficient sources of fat that lead to health benefits noted above.
