Macros - Good and Bad Fats

pmsherlock

If I need to hit 70g Fats a day on my Macros what a good ratio of good to bad fats? I presume from a weight loss perspective it makes no difference but from a health point of view 70g of fats that came from bad sources (meat, dairy etc) would effect my cholesterol?

mike_ny

Good fats: Saturated, Mono-unsaturated, Omega 3, & cold pressed seed oils - butter, coconut oil, olive oil, oily fish, pastured raised meats, walnut oil, etc...

Bad fats: Trans-fats, Poly-unsaturated (either processed with or heated to high temperatures) - hydrogenated fats, canola oil, and most other vegetable oils

As far as ratios, there is no safe acceptable level of trans-fats. Other than the few naturally occurring ones, avoid these completely. Keep your poly-unsaturated (other than cold pressed seed oils) low, but they're hard to avoid when eating anywhere other than home. The ratio to be concerned with is the Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio. Ideally, you would want a one to one ratio or as close to that as you could get. The typical diet is very high in Omega 6 and very low in Omega 3. Pasture raised meats, cutting back on polyunsaturated fats, and adding high sources of Omega 3 in your diet are the best options to improve that ratio.

There is also no proven link between dietary fat and cholesterol and blood levels. Doctors are slowly coming around to this, but years of flawed studies and recommendations based on them have become so mainstream, that those attitudes are hard to change.
There are people,who eat high fat and high cholesterol diets with low cholesterol and people who eat almost no dietary fat or cholesterol with high cholesterol numbers. Furthermore, about half of people with heart attacks actually don't have high cholesterol. Current studies seem to be finding more of a correlation between sugar as an inflammation issue and heart disease.

This is based on the most current information from many sources. The majority of doctors and dietitians, however, still continue to preach the old debunked mantra of avoiding saturated fats and using "heart healthy" oils like canola. Do your own research and decide for yourself. Personally, I'm betting my life (literally) on the above definitions.

Branstin

Here is some helpful information:

http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/fat/art-20045550

mike_ny

The Mayo Clinic is still giving outdated information. The mainstream medical community changes very slowly.

The medical community waited a year or more to use anesthesia for operations because it was a new-fangled approach. Operations and amputations without it worked just fine for all those years, so why change something that wasn't broken? They've dragged their feet on many other things too, poisoning people and causing unnecessary suffering and deaths while waiting on lengthy studies and board approvals that take forever and are challenged by people vested in exiting methods and business interests and profits that may be affected.

The main thing to remember is that most doctors only received a few lectures at most on nutrition while in medical school. That's all that is required, so most are working with a limited exposure to old information unless they take the imitative and time to seek and keep up with current information beyond the biased information they get from the drug reps that drop by several times a week.