MFP Fat Recommedation

ReyJ412

Hello everyone. I have rejoined MFP after a two year or so hiatus. While setting up my nutrient goals, I noticed that MFP defaults to a higher saturated fat level over monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat. My understanding is that both mono and polyunsaturated fat levels should be preferred over saturated fats. In fact, MFP set a goal of 0 for the poly and mono and set a goal of 26 or so for saturated, making me scratch my head here. Am I missing something with the fats?

Rockmama1111

It’s confusing! I think the saturated fat goal is your maximum, but maybe the other healthier fats really don’t have a minimum or a limit? When I realized that eating an avocado puts me over my monounsaturated goal, that’s all I could come up with.

neanderthin

Depends on who is recommending which fats are to be restricted. Obviously MFP follows the general guidelines and that is to restrict saturated fat and I believe they don't have any restrictions on mono or poly fats, which I believe has just defaulted to 0.

For example, I don't follow those particular guidelines set around 40 years and myself being low carb, the general consensus dealing with this is to keep polyunsaturated fats to a minimum and to fill the balance of fat consumption with monounsaturated and saturated.

DFW_Tom

@neanderthin, are you sure that is the current general consensus for everyone? What I see from various guidelines is to reduce daily calories from saturated fats to no more than 6-10%, while polyunsaturated fats are considered healthy fats. Guidelines also call for overall fat intake to be limited, but forget the level because being low carb myself, I exceed those suggested levels by a lot. Think it is something like 30-35% of daily calories.

To be fair, I have also seen weight loss gurus claiming you can eat all the bacon you want. That saturated fats and elevated LDL levels aren't necessarily bad for you.

neanderthin

The recommendations are

DFW_Tom wrote: »

@neanderthin, are you sure that is the current general consensus for everyone? What I see from various guidelines is to reduce daily calories from saturated fats to no more than 6-10%, while polyunsaturated fats are considered healthy fats. Guidelines also call for overall fat intake to be limited, but forget the level because being low carb myself, I exceed those suggested levels by a lot. Think it is something like 30-35% of daily calories.

To be fair, I have also seen weight loss gurus claiming you can eat all the bacon you want. That saturated fats and elevated LDL levels aren't necessarily bad for you.

I'd have to look back and see the actual recommendations but I believe back in the 80's or around then was to not consume more than 30% of calories from fat and to keep saturated fat to 10% then later on they changed to 20-35% total fat and to reduce saturated fat to <10% .

Polyunsaturated fats are healthy, that end of fatty acid chain is where the "essential fats" of omega 3's are found. They are a double edge sword though. we've been consuming a ratio of omega 6's to omega 3's in a ratio of around 15:1 where evolutionarily it was anywhere from 4:1 to 1:1 with omega 6's found mostly in plants being pro inflammatory by nature and omega 3's from seafood anti inflammatory, so basically increasing chronic inflammation with in the body.


Personally I've never had a problem consuming saturated fat, after all it is a fat found in abundance in nature in it's original state and one we've been consuming for over 2 million years and a little common sense and critical thinking might draw the conclusion that during our evolution the body wasn't trying to create atherosclerosis to kill us while at the same time we took industrial oil that were never designed for food to be then added to the food supply and one of those oils were the partially hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils that generated trans fat.

I found this. From the British Medical Journal

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/53/22/1393

A way forward

There is opportunity for strong agreement among health professionals. If the public health message were revised to advise citizens to eat natural food and not processed food, saturated fat intake might fall although the health benefit would likely be due to the concomitant reduction in sucrose, trans fats and other processed ingredients deleterious to human health.42 Human beings evolved to eat foods available from the natural environment.43 It does not seem logical to advise populations away from carcass meat, dairy, eggs, nuts and seeds, in the name of saturated fat, when the modern processed foods, cookies, cakes, pizza, desserts and ready meals are more sensibly related to modern illness.6

Close
The USDA and HHS asked for public comments in response to the following question: ‘What is the relationship between saturated fats consumption (types and amounts) during adulthood and risk of CVD?’6 The answer is that there is adequate evidence of no relationship between saturated fat consumption during adulthood and actual CVD outcomes. There is also strong agreement from robust meta-analyses of no relationship between saturated fat consumption and: total mortality; CVD mortality; fatal MIs; non-fatal MIs; strokes; CHD mortality or CHD events.

neanderthin

DFW_Tom wrote: »

To be fair, I have also seen weight loss gurus claiming you can eat all the bacon you want. That saturated fats and elevated LDL levels aren't necessarily bad for you.

As I've already stated, I don't have a problem with saturated fat and therefore the science behind cholesterol also fell within my purview for obvious reasons. Again elevated LDL has literally no influence whether arteries are calcified or will over time. Without getting into the minutia, unless someone wants to, it's oxidized LDL that are atherogenic which are a sub category of LDL, one of two basic groups and if a persons LDL particles fall within the category with oxidized cholesterol, then it's a problem. My LDL particles do not fall in that category which is also a common feature in the low carb community and one of the reasons why people decide to consume low carbs. This also related back to my statement whether during our evolution that natural saturated fat created a disease like atherosclerosis, and if it is, then it basically happened in the last 100 years and mostly in the last 50. Cheers.

AnnPT77

I'm not going to get into the good fats/bad fats side of the debate here.

This is my understanding of why MFP's default goals are the way that they are:

It's pretty mainstream to recommend limiting saturated fat intake, where mainstream means sources like USDA, NHS, many registered dietitians, etc. (I'm leaving the debate to others about whether the mainstream is right or not, but I'm pretty confident that that is the mainstream nutritional advice these days.) Therefore, MFP sets a default goal, which they expect we'll treat as a limit (not to exceed).

When it comes to monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, the mainstream advice seems to be "relatively more is good", but there doesn't seem to be a consensus about exactly how much we should be aiming for. Since MFP pretty much doesn't make up the goals themselves, but relies on mainstream norms, they don't set a numeric goal.

Some people here think the mono/tfat goals should be set to something like N/A, as a consequence.

However, if MFP did that, it wouldn't be quite as programmatically simple to let us set our own personalized goals for those. (In general, MFP accommodates you setting your own personal nutritional or calorie goals, if you choose to do so.) If you don't want to research it, just want to go with mainstream recommendations, that's pretty much what MFP is giving you in the default values. The mono/poly fats default is just a little oddball.

I'll let y'all go back to the debate about whether sat fat actually is bad, how much mono/poly is needed, O-3/O-6 balance, and all that sort of thing. (Personally, I care about those, I just don't have much of a soapbox about it.)

DFW_Tom

Merry Christmas!

This is just the kind of discussion that is so useful to a dummy like me. I appreciate it when others are willing to take the time to post explanations that even I can follow. @neanderthin, I don't recall ever hearing of the term, "oxidized cholesterol" but quickly found this after reading your reply:

Your immune system may mistake oxidized cholesterol for bacteria. Your immune system then tries to fight it off, which can cause inflammation inside of the arterial wall. This can lead to atherosclerosis or heart disease.

This article goes on to say that one of the 3 main ways oxidized cholesterol builds up in the bloodstream is by eating excess polyunsaturated fatty acids. Eating oil fried food and smoking are the other two.

@AnnPT77, I've come to doubt there will ever be a consensus about exactly how much we should be aiming for in anything we eat. Even researchers don't agree as stated in this study:

Conclusions High LDL-C is inversely associated with mortality in most people over 60 years. This finding is inconsistent with the cholesterol hypothesis (ie, that cholesterol, particularly LDL-C, is inherently atherogenic). Since elderly people with high LDL-C live as long or longer than those with low LDL-C, our analysis provides reason to question the validity of the cholesterol hypothesis. Moreover, our study provides the rationale for a re-evaluation of guidelines recommending pharmacological reduction of LDL-C in the elderly as a component of cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/6/e010401

(First time I've heard of any thing saying that higher LDL is better than low LDL in those of us over 60.)

neanderthin

DFW_Tom wrote: »

Merry Christmas!

This is just the kind of discussion that is so useful to a dummy like me. I appreciate it when others are willing to take the time to post explanations that even I can follow. @neanderthin, I don't recall ever hearing of the term, "oxidized cholesterol" but quickly found this after reading your reply:

Your immune system may mistake oxidized cholesterol for bacteria. Your immune system then tries to fight it off, which can cause inflammation inside of the arterial wall. This can lead to atherosclerosis or heart disease.

This article goes on to say that one of the 3 main ways oxidized cholesterol builds up in the bloodstream is by eating excess polyunsaturated fatty acids. Eating oil fried food and smoking are the other two.

@AnnPT77, I've come to doubt there will ever be a consensus about exactly how much we should be aiming for in anything we eat. Even researchers don't agree as stated in this study:

Conclusions High LDL-C is inversely associated with mortality in most people over 60 years. This finding is inconsistent with the cholesterol hypothesis (ie, that cholesterol, particularly LDL-C, is inherently atherogenic). Since elderly people with high LDL-C live as long or longer than those with low LDL-C, our analysis provides reason to question the validity of the cholesterol hypothesis. Moreover, our study provides the rationale for a re-evaluation of guidelines recommending pharmacological reduction of LDL-C in the elderly as a component of cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/6/e010401

(First time I've heard of any thing saying that higher LDL is better than low LDL in those of us over 60.)

Yeah, I can't remember the first time I read that higher total C (cholesterol) was inversely associated with heart disease in the elderly, but it's a least a decade ago and if I remember correctly it was especially apparent in women.

Polyunsaturated fats are just more easily oxidized than mono or saturated fat. Saturated fat resides within a long chain of carbon atoms starting at the 4th atom and finishing with the 16th atom that are fully saturated with hydrogen between those atoms, so basically the chains of fat are closer together allowing to go solid and saturated fats are almost impervious to oxidation. Monounsaturated fat have one double bond that creates a gap in the fatty acid chain and polyunsaturated fats have 2 or more double bonds so both are less saturated and why they stay liquid at room temp. but are susceptible to oxidation and in this context poly fats are the most susceptible, especially because poly fats are where the essential fats are and in that context should be protected against that oxidation which is created by heat, oxygen and light and why we see omega3 supplements protected in a capsule and ALA which is an omega 6 mostly from flax and if in supplement form it's generally found in an opaque container and refrigerated.

These omega fats whether found in plants or seafood are protected in their natural state either in the seeds of the plant, generally, or in the flesh of the seafood, which is a why it's a good idea getting these fats from natural foods as opposed to ultra processed and processed food and veg seed oils because these have been refined and fully exposed to oxidation and why most of western society get way too much of that particular fat and like I said in ratio's that are not exactly normal. Fried foods, well that's all seed oil pretty much so it gets heated again. Personally I stay as far away from refined seed oils as I can and my go to fats other than animal fats are olive, avocado and coconut oils, also raw and unrefined, which also preserves all of the nutrients like vit E and antioxidants. Systemic inflammation is the main driver of cardiovascular events and in this context the fat we eat is more of a minor player.

The largest contributor to oxidized cholesterol is the consumption of ultra processed and processed foods which left unchecked raises our triglycerides and lowers our HDL and it's HDL's job to shuttle back LDL cholesterol back to the liver and in this context the longer LDL lipoproteins linger throughout our bloodstream and don't connect to receptors the more oxidation happens as well, so we don't want to lower HDL we want to raise HDL. The increase in triglycerides get packed into the LDL lipoprotein along with cholesterol but displaces the cholesterol cargo with those trigs which increases the lipoprotein numbers to compensate, so now we have to not only deal with oxidized cholesterol but now we need to cope with the extra lipoprotein quantity to do the same job, not what we want to happen.

Merry Christmas, Cheers.