Good fats versus bad fat
ddaro86
Posts: 1
I wish that my fitness pal would update the fact that polyunsaturated and mono unsaturated fat is good, as compared to saturated fat. Polly and mono-unsaturated fat burns fat.
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Saturated fat is good.0
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Saturated fat is good. All fat is good and we need a balance of all kinds of fat (other than transfat). TOO MUCH of a GOOD thing can be BAD. It's all about balance.0
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Saturated fat is good. All fat is good and we need a balance of all kinds of fat (other than transfat). TOO MUCH of a GOOD thing can be BAD. It's all about balance.
Yes and no. Like carbohydrates, saturated fat is essential for your body to function properly, however there is no recommended dietary minimum for saturated fat because your body can produce all that it needs. Too much dietary saturated fat otoh, has been linked to high cholesterol in many studies, however there are other studies that question the link, especially if you replace saturated fat with sugar.
So while there is no recommended dietary minimum, there is a recommended maximum, and it's not all that high, usually on the order of 14g to 20g. That's not very much and the typical American diet tends to exceed it.0 -
Ask yourself why in nature that most whole foods that have fat, and that's pretty much all food sources contain all three major types in different degrees depending on the nutritional needs (profile) of that particular food.....all are good, none are bad.0
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neanderthin wrote: »Ask yourself why in nature that most whole foods that have fat, and that's pretty much all food sources contain all three major types in different degrees depending on the nutritional needs (profile) of that particular food.....all are good, none are bad.
Humans don't tend to eat foods found in nature. We eat foods that we have been selectively bred over the centuries to match our liking. The almonds that you find in nature, for example, tend to contain a lot of cyanide which has no nutritional value at all and is in fact a poison. You don't ever want to eat a wild almond. Occasionally, nature will produce an almond with a recessive trait that reduces the amount of cyanide. Humans bred those almonds extensively, each time creating an almond with less poison until we came up with the version that we consume today. Along the way, we also tended to selectively breed almonds that were bigger and tastier.
In a similar fashion, other plants and animals were selectively bred to provide us with more of what we want: more meat, more fat, bigger seed pods, sweeter taste, etc. All of this was done long before we understand anything about different types of fat. Today we can manufacture all kinds of foods but nutrition is still a relatively new science and it's hard to say definitely how much of anything we should or shouldn't eat. We can't depend on what's in "nature" because we don't eat natural foods and besides, ancient humans who did tended to die young and who really knows how much of that was diet related?
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Which has nothing to do with anything, it is what it is and if I thought that because avocado has more saturated fat than wild salmon on a gram basis and stopped eating avocado because genetics might be adrift, shoot me.peter56765 wrote: »neanderthin wrote: »Ask yourself why in nature that most whole foods that have fat, and that's pretty much all food sources contain all three major types in different degrees depending on the nutritional needs (profile) of that particular food.....all are good, none are bad.
Humans don't tend to eat foods found in nature. We eat foods that we have been selectively bred over the centuries to match our liking. The almonds that you find in nature, for example, tend to contain a lot of cyanide which has no nutritional value at all and is in fact a poison. You don't ever want to eat a wild almond. Occasionally, nature will produce an almond with a recessive trait that reduces the amount of cyanide. Humans bred those almonds extensively, each time creating an almond with less poison until we came up with the version that we consume today. Along the way, we also tended to selectively breed almonds that were bigger and tastier.
In a similar fashion, other plants and animals were selectively bred to provide us with more of what we want: more meat, more fat, bigger seed pods, sweeter taste, etc. All of this was done long before we understand anything about different types of fat. Today we can manufacture all kinds of foods but nutrition is still a relatively new science and it's hard to say definitely how much of anything we should or shouldn't eat. We can't depend on what's in "nature" because we don't eat natural foods and besides, ancient humans who did tended to die young and who really knows how much of that was diet related?
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neanderthin wrote: »
Which has nothing to do with anything, it is what it is and if I thought that because avocado has more saturated fat than wild salmon on a gram basis and stopped eating avocado because genetics might be adrift, shoot me.peter56765 wrote: »neanderthin wrote: »Ask yourself why in nature that most whole foods that have fat, and that's pretty much all food sources contain all three major types in different degrees depending on the nutritional needs (profile) of that particular food.....all are good, none are bad.
Humans don't tend to eat foods found in nature. We eat foods that we have been selectively bred over the centuries to match our liking. The almonds that you find in nature, for example, tend to contain a lot of cyanide which has no nutritional value at all and is in fact a poison. You don't ever want to eat a wild almond. Occasionally, nature will produce an almond with a recessive trait that reduces the amount of cyanide. Humans bred those almonds extensively, each time creating an almond with less poison until we came up with the version that we consume today. Along the way, we also tended to selectively breed almonds that were bigger and tastier.
In a similar fashion, other plants and animals were selectively bred to provide us with more of what we want: more meat, more fat, bigger seed pods, sweeter taste, etc. All of this was done long before we understand anything about different types of fat. Today we can manufacture all kinds of foods but nutrition is still a relatively new science and it's hard to say definitely how much of anything we should or shouldn't eat. We can't depend on what's in "nature" because we don't eat natural foods and besides, ancient humans who did tended to die young and who really knows how much of that was diet related?
To the contrary, it is quite on point. Avocados are the way they are because we bred them to be that way. You can't point at an avocado and say "See, it is a natural whole food that has a lot of saturated fat therefore saturated fats must be OK." We made them that way. On the flip side, cyanide naturally occurs in almonds but that doesn't mean there's anything "good" about cyanide in your diet.0 -
Nutrition Panel Calls for Less Sugar and Eases Cholesterol and Fat Restrictions
You'll find links to the full report files in the article.
From the article (and apropos to this thread): "the guidelines encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat they are eating but on the type.
The guidelines advise people to eat unsaturated fat — the kind found in fish, nuts, and olive and vegetable oils — in place of saturated fat, which occurs primarily in animal foods."
The article then goes on to include criticisms on each recommendation from various groups, likely in the interest of providing "balance".0 -
peter56765 wrote: »
Nutrition Panel Calls for Less Sugar and Eases Cholesterol and Fat Restrictions
You'll find links to the full report files in the article.
From the article (and apropos to this thread): "the guidelines encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat they are eating but on the type.
The guidelines advise people to eat unsaturated fat — the kind found in fish, nuts, and olive and vegetable oils — in place of saturated fat, which occurs primarily in animal foods."
The article then goes on to include criticisms on each recommendation from various groups, likely in the interest of providing "balance".
My point was they no longer say saturated fat and cholesterol are "bad." They'll probably be debating saturated vs unsaturated for another 20 years, at least until one lobby group manages to fully outfund the other. Americans eat too much of everything, due in large part to the previous guidelines. Any change in the right direction is an improvement.0 -
peter56765 wrote: »
Nutrition Panel Calls for Less Sugar and Eases Cholesterol and Fat Restrictions
You'll find links to the full report files in the article.
From the article (and apropos to this thread): "the guidelines encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat they are eating but on the type.
The guidelines advise people to eat unsaturated fat — the kind found in fish, nuts, and olive and vegetable oils — in place of saturated fat, which occurs primarily in animal foods."
The article then goes on to include criticisms on each recommendation from various groups, likely in the interest of providing "balance".
My point was they no longer say saturated fat and cholesterol are "bad." They'll probably be debating saturated vs unsaturated for another 20 years, at least until one lobby group manages to fully outfund the other. Americans eat too much of everything, due in large part to the previous guidelines. Any change in the right direction is an improvement.
I doubt Americans eat too much because of advisory panel guidelines.
The industrial food complex spends billions on advertising trying to get people to consume sugar laden, fat laden food, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of how the industrial food complex pushes the SAD diet.
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peter56765 wrote: »
Nutrition Panel Calls for Less Sugar and Eases Cholesterol and Fat Restrictions
You'll find links to the full report files in the article.
From the article (and apropos to this thread): "the guidelines encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat they are eating but on the type.
The guidelines advise people to eat unsaturated fat — the kind found in fish, nuts, and olive and vegetable oils — in place of saturated fat, which occurs primarily in animal foods."
The article then goes on to include criticisms on each recommendation from various groups, likely in the interest of providing "balance".
My point was they no longer say saturated fat and cholesterol are "bad." They'll probably be debating saturated vs unsaturated for another 20 years, at least until one lobby group manages to fully outfund the other. Americans eat too much of everything, due in large part to the previous guidelines. Any change in the right direction is an improvement.
I doubt Americans eat too much because of advisory panel guidelines.
The industrial food complex spends billions on advertising trying to get people to consume sugar laden, fat laden food, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of how the industrial food complex pushes the SAD diet.
You doubt that 20 years of everyone from kindergarten to medical school being told to eat a diet that causes diabetes had any impact on them? Or every school, hospital, and even prison meal served in the country for 20 years being based on those guidelines didn't contribute? If chocolate milk, french fries, corn and corn dogs are suitable for school lunch (which they were, frequently, up until a few years ago), why would anyone think eating the same thing all the time is bad? School says it's healthy, right? And pickle relish and pizza sauce are vegetables in that school of thought, too.
As for that industrial food complex, who do you think is influencing the guidelines?
Pick anything, beef, corn, olive oil, if it has a lobby group, they've submitted comments on the new guidelines.0 -
The only fat that I stay clear of (where possible) is hydrogenated, every other is fair game and can sometimes make up 30-45% of my daily intake.
Saturated fat isn't your enemy, it is definitely something that your body needs.
All the best.
Adam0 -
Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.0
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Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.
Saturated Fat is Back, or Is It?0 -
Today I ate 80% fat and I feel great!0
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Read David Perlmutter's book "Grain brain"
Fat is essential, carbs are not.0 -
Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.
Please don't. Or if you do, make sure that you check out the "facts" by yourself.0 -
Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.
Dr. Katz zings her pretty good in this
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/were-fat-and-sick-and-the-broccoli-did-it_b_6744724.html
"And, by the way, the now famous notion that we decreased our intake of dietary fat, or even saturated fat, is mostly belied by national trend data. We actually kept our total fat intake, and saturated fat intake, nearly constant, but diluted it down as a percent of total calories by eating more low-fat junk food. The idea that cutting saturated fat doesn't foster cardiovascular health is based on the antics of a population that never cut their saturated fat intake in the first place. Oops."
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Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.
Dr. Katz zings her pretty good in this
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/were-fat-and-sick-and-the-broccoli-did-it_b_6744724.html
"And, by the way, the now famous notion that we decreased our intake of dietary fat, or even saturated fat, is mostly belied by national trend data. We actually kept our total fat intake, and saturated fat intake, nearly constant, but diluted it down as a percent of total calories by eating more low-fat junk food. The idea that cutting saturated fat doesn't foster cardiovascular health is based on the antics of a population that never cut their saturated fat intake in the first place. Oops."
Excellent!0 -
The only fat that I stay clear of (where possible) is hydrogenated, every other is fair game and can sometimes make up 30-45% of my daily intake.
Saturated fat isn't your enemy, it is definitely something that your body needs.
All the best.
Adam
Not exactly. Your body needs the fatty acids and cholesterol that dietary fats are broken down into, however both cholesterol and all but two fatty acids can be synthesized by your body. The two that are not, so-called essential fatty acids, can be found in all kinds of fats, saturated and unsaturated. Although you need a certain amount of fat in your diet, there is no minimum recommended dietary intake for saturated fat specifically. On the flip side, saturated fat has been linked to heart disease in many studies, although the link is complicated and is hard to control for, so there is a recommended dietary maximum for it.0 -
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We didn't synthesize almonds de novo. They were found in nature because we are part of that larger ecosystem. Many biological entities selectively manipulate their food sources from toxoplasmosis to worms mosiac virus to aphids to bears to squirrels to spiders to humans....peter56765 wrote: »neanderthin wrote: »Ask yourself why in nature that most whole foods that have fat, and that's pretty much all food sources contain all three major types in different degrees depending on the nutritional needs (profile) of that particular food.....all are good, none are bad.
Humans don't tend to eat foods found in nature. We eat foods that we have been selectively bred over the centuries to match our liking. The almonds that you find in nature, for example, tend to contain a lot of cyanide which has no nutritional value at all and is in fact a poison. You don't ever want to eat a wild almond. Occasionally, nature will produce an almond with a recessive trait that reduces the amount of cyanide. Humans bred those almonds extensively, each time creating an almond with less poison until we came up with the version that we consume today. Along the way, we also tended to selectively breed almonds that were bigger and tastier.
In a similar fashion, other plants and animals were selectively bred to provide us with more of what we want: more meat, more fat, bigger seed pods, sweeter taste, etc. All of this was done long before we understand anything about different types of fat. Today we can manufacture all kinds of foods but nutrition is still a relatively new science and it's hard to say definitely how much of anything we should or shouldn't eat. We can't depend on what's in "nature" because we don't eat natural foods and besides, ancient humans who did tended to die young and who really knows how much of that was diet related?
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Saturated fat is fine. The only fat that is bad is laboratory trans fat. Naturally occurring trans fat is fine too.I wish that my fitness pal would update the fact that polyunsaturated and mono unsaturated fat is good, as compared to saturated fat.
This is not true, fat does not burn fat. No macronutrient burns fat, only negative energy balance burns fat...Polly and mono-unsaturated fat burns fat.0 -
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Read "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz if you really want to understand why saturated fats are the most healthful for human beings, and understand why and how we've been lied to for over 60 years.
Dr. Katz zings her pretty good in this
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/were-fat-and-sick-and-the-broccoli-did-it_b_6744724.html
"And, by the way, the now famous notion that we decreased our intake of dietary fat, or even saturated fat, is mostly belied by national trend data. We actually kept our total fat intake, and saturated fat intake, nearly constant, but diluted it down as a percent of total calories by eating more low-fat junk food. The idea that cutting saturated fat doesn't foster cardiovascular health is based on the antics of a population that never cut their saturated fat intake in the first place. Oops."
This is a great chart (I'll read the article later). So obesity and diabetes have increased, but US per capita consumption of g of saturated fat has stayed the same. I did see the % of deaths from heart disease have decreased since 1980 although it's not clear why (sure, we can speculate that a large part is due to more awareness and aggressive treatment of it). http://cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88.htm
I'm actually reading The Big Fat Surprise right now, and although I'm irritated by the selective use of data by the author, I'm also irritated by the selective use of data by the early investigators into nutrition and diet, and our politicians' ready acceptance of the opinions of a few loud voices (although that bit doesn't surprise me, I guess).
My take on it is to probably coming around to Michael Pollan's "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too much". So I eat a wide range of everything you can imagine, including animal fat (which I save from roasts etc.) and whole fat dairy, but if you check out my diary it's mainly veggies and fruit. I guess we're all trying to find our way here.
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