Type of fats.....

ailsadell

being fairly new to the LCHF diet (4 weeks) I guess I'm still pretty scared about fats. I do cook with them, but mainly olive oil and occasionally butter. I don't like fatty meats, and would never eat bacon or sausage unless grilled so the fats remain in the pan. I simply just do not care for the taste.

So, after reading many posts saying fats are good, are they all?? Surely the type of fats from bacon, sausage etc are still bad for your health no matter what??

kirkor

Pork fat is "less good" than other fats mainly due to the living & killing conditions of factory-farmed pigs, and fat is where the funky stuff gets deposited. Also processed meats in general (bacon, sausage, deli meats, etc) have stuff added to them that don't really add to your health.

re: other fatty cuts of meat & taste, grass-fed beef will taste a bit different than CAFO beef (and likely healthier for you too) so maybe try some of that out. I find seasoning can make a big difference, with the fat taking on the flavor of what you're adding. Some people take leftover pan fat and make different ad hoc sauces with it.

Coconut oil & avocado oil are other good fats. You're already doing olive oil & butter so that's cool ... try making clarified butter/ghee sometime, it's really easy: simmer butter and separate out the milk proteins; makes it less gut-disrupty, has a higher smoke point, and longer shelf life.

AngInCanada

I fats. I've resorted to eating a little bit of butter to tide me over to a meal. Do not fear the fat. I'm like you though....I'm not a fan of bacon fat. Most of my fats come from butter, olive oil, and coconut oil. We eat a lot of deer, elk, and moose which are very lean so I usually add in fat when cooking those.

jumanajane

In short...no they are not! Lots of studies now show we have been brainwashed into thinking saturated fats are bad.....and they aren't!

jumanajane

Angincanada...if you are getting hungry between meals just add more fats to your meals! It's the fats stop you feeling hungry and reaching for anything carby!

GaleHawkins

Coconut based food is a huge part of my Fats sources. Along with Heavy Whipping Cream I start the day with an 800 calorie cup of coffee. For some reason eating sticks of butter still is not my thing. I grew up with it on the table made from the milk I got by milking by hand and my mom would churn it to make butter.

I agree it can be stange living on 80% fat and it takes time to get the mind wrapped around the concept.

Now I feel the best and lose OK eating at the Huddle House. It is 5 eggs over easy medium, 2 sausages and 3 pieces of bacon plus 4 cups of coffee with about 20 mini cups of half and half. They give me the 2 extra eggs for leaving off all of the carb sides.

Getting to high fat was required for me to get and stay into ketosis well. One can not cut both fats and carbs at the same time it seems. While I eat less than 50 grams of carbs daily I get most of my carbs from protein and fat due to 58% of protein and 10% of the fat I eat being converted to carbs after I eat them so my carb needs are met without eating carbs.

It took months to get my head around that concept.

ihatetodietalways

GaleHawkins wrote: »

Coconut based food is a huge part of my Fats sources. Along with Heavy Whipping Cream I start the day with an 800 calorie cup of coffee. For some reason eating sticks of butter still is not my thing. I grew up with it on the table made from the milk I got by milking by hand and my mom would churn it to make butter.

I agree it can be stange living on 80% fat and it takes time to get the mind wrapped around the concept.

Now I feel the best and lose OK eating at the Huddle House. It is 5 eggs over easy medium, 2 sausages and 3 pieces of bacon plus 4 cups of coffee with about 20 mini cups of half and half. They give me the 2 extra eggs for leaving off all of the carb sides.

Getting to high fat was required for me to get and stay into ketosis well. One can not cut both fats and carbs at the same time it seems. While I eat less than 50 grams of carbs daily I get most of my carbs from protein and fat due to 58% of protein and 10% of the fat I eat being converted to carbs after I eat them so my carb needs are met without eating carbs.

It took months to get my head around that concept.

How many calories is this a day? Half of the protein is converted to carb?

FIT_Goat

ihatetodietalways wrote: »

Half of the protein is converted to carb?

It's not, don't worry about it. The 58% is the theoretical upper-limit for protein->carb conversion, but it's not an automatic thing. Don't stress about protein. You would be an extremely rare person, if protein in any normal amounts (the amounts you get from real food) was the difference between the success and failure of your low carb diet.

Edit: If things worked that way, I would have had nearly 200 grams of carbs yesterday. Surely, that would have kicked me out of ketosis. But, it didn't. And, my weight continues to drop. Don't try and count fat/protein against your carb goals. Focus on carbs from food only. Your body will take care of meeting its own needs by converting protein and lipids to carbs only as is required. You don't need, or even want, to try and control that process.

Lrdoflamancha

I agree it can be stange living on 80% fat and it takes time to get the mind wrapped around the concept.

It took months to get my head around that concept. [/quote]

Me too.... After eating this way since Feb 1 .... I still have problems with it.

Dragonwolf

ailsadell wrote: »

being fairly new to the LCHF diet (4 weeks) I guess I'm still pretty scared about fats. I do cook with them, but mainly olive oil and occasionally butter. I don't like fatty meats, and would never eat bacon or sausage unless grilled so the fats remain in the pan. I simply just do not care for the taste.

So, after reading many posts saying fats are good, are they all?? Surely the type of fats from bacon, sausage etc are still bad for your health no matter what??

Environmental toxins and additives notwithstanding, no.

The fats in bacon and sausage is the same found in pork chops and other cuts. And no, they're not bad for your health. In fact, they (the saturated fats) are required for good health. Yes, I know, it sounds backwards.

Consider this, though:

Regardless of what you eat, roughly half (40-50%) of the fat on your body is saturated fat (specifically, primarily palmitic acid), 40-50% is monounsaturated (primarily oleic acid), and 5-10% is polyunsaturated (primarily linoleic).

When you cut calories, regardless of how you do that, the body makes up for the deficit with the fat stores.

This means that 50% of the calories from your deficit come from saturated fat.

If saturated fat was so bad for your health, then why would half of the fat on your body be saturated?

There are only two fats you should avoid like the plague -- artificial trans fats (hydrogenated oils) and oxidized fats (industrial seed oils, heated heavy-polyunsaturated oils, and fats that have been heated beyond their smoke point). These fats are damaged and compromise the integrity of your cells.

The next is polyunsaturated fats. They're not "bad," per se, but should be consumed sparingly and always in cold applications. Nut oils, for example, are generally high in polyunsaturated fatty acids. They're fragile and oxidize easily when heated. This is why good Omega oil supplements should be kept refrigerated.

From there, have at the saturated and monounsaturated fats. Both are heat-stable, though the monounsaturated fats generally come from plant, and contain polyphenols and other compounds that do break down when heated, which can affect the taste and other benefits from the fat source in question (for example, extra virgin olive oil has a lot of good compounds that tend to break down when heated). As such, I, personally, generally favor olive oil for cold uses, and use animal fats or sometimes coconut oil for cooking, but that one's up to you. The key for both, though, is to not heat the oils above their smoke point, as that indicates that the acids start breaking down.

Also, animal fats are not pure saturated fats (ironically, that honor goes to the coconut; a fruit, of all things). Most of the animals that we eat actually have a similar 40-50%/40-50%/5-10% fatty acid profile to our own (fish and poultry have more polyunsaturated fats). This blend is why butter (and rendered lard and tallow) soften, but don't liquefy at room temperature (palmitic acid's melting point is 145F, while oleic acid's melting point is 55F and linoelic acid's melting point is 23F).

As @kirkor mentioned, though, pork is considered "less good" because of the conditions pigs are often raised in, especially in industrial farms. Pigs (and chickens, for that matter) are omnivores. In industrial farms, this means they often get fed some pretty nasty crap (in some of the worst situations, they even get fed meal made from the scraps of their own species (e.g. - poultry by-product meal, feather meal, etc). (Note: blood and bone meals are actually good for both pigs and chickens, since they're omnivores, but cannibalism isn't really a thing under normal circumstances.) Any toxins in the feed or environment are stored in the animal's fat.

This can be avoided pretty easily, though, by sourcing pork and poultry from trusted sources, who use good feed and raise the animals in sanitary conditions, ideally in good pasture land. You don't need pork, though, so if you don't like it, don't feel obligated to eat it. The bacon thing is largely a joke, anyway, and most people actually don't eat a lot of bacon (I've actually gone to two potlucks, now, in circles where bacon stuff is a thing, and neither had bacon).

Eating unrendered animal fats (the strips of fat on cuts of meat) can take some time to get used to (thank you, decades of fat-phobia). For example, I can eat pork fat all day, but can only eat small amounts of bison or beef fat at a time (beef moreso than bison right now), and can barely handle lamb fat. Each is more rich than the last (at least to me). A good way to acclimate to it is to eat the pieces of fat with an amount of lean. It helps cut the fatty flavor and texture.

I'm feeling like a broken record this evening, but this video is very enlightening about how our society came to fear saturated fats:

KarlaYP

I finally lost hungry once I got my fat grams up. I was resistant, in the beginning, because of what I had been taught too. This is a whole new way of looking at food and can take a little while to retrain your brain. Hang in there!