Saturated fat
mormas
Posts: 188 Member
Hi,
Quick question if I may...
Do I need to be overly concerned over the makeup of my 70% fat?
I could easily hit my 70% /109g fat target, but struggle to keep my saturated fat below 15g (as per the MFP calculation).
Thanks in advance
Quick question if I may...
Do I need to be overly concerned over the makeup of my 70% fat?
I could easily hit my 70% /109g fat target, but struggle to keep my saturated fat below 15g (as per the MFP calculation).
Thanks in advance
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Replies
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Saturated fat isn't the bad guy anymore when you cut out the carbs. It's when it mingles with lots of carbs that it can cause chaos in your body. There's a good thread under Shopping With FitGoat that addresses the more important issue, which is the ratio of Omega 3s and 6s.
Here's a link to a chart that shows the amount of Omega 3 and 6 fats in common sources. You have to scroll down quite a bit.
http://paleozonenutrition.com/2011/05/10/omega-6-and-3-in-nuts-oils-meat-and-fish-tools-to-get-it-right/0 -
I too haven't found evidence that the typical person needs to worry about saturated fats. There is a very small minority that sees huge cholesterol issues with a sat fat diet, others are fine.
I just avoid trans fats and limit vegetable oils beyond coconut oil and a bit of olive oil.0 -
I hit 108 grams of saturated fat today. This is a "tad" bit higher than MFP recommends.
I don't worry about it, actually I prefer it. A large portion of your body fat is saturated. Why would your body store energy in a form that is harmful? It wouldn't. So, I just aim to get my fat from animal sources. Those sources will provide saturated fat in the correct proportions for health, or close enough. You can't get saturated fats low without relying on plant oils, which aren't foods that we evolved eating. So, there's little reason to think that our bodies do better with saturated fats kept low.0 -
Why would your body store energy in a form that is harmful? It wouldn't.
Well, it also makes glucose, and inflammatory cytokines, and cancer cells....
AFAIK, your body doesn't necessarily store fat as SFA. It will incorporate dietary fat unchanged, except for the esterification.
A lot of the SFA we make endogenously is made from excess carb intake. Apparently not a good thing.
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What kinds of fats are you eating? Saturated fats are the majority of mine. In the form of coconut oil, butter and animal fats.0
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Hi , thanks for the replies.
The Sat Fat I am eating comes mainly from meat.
I have now removed the sat fat counter from my diary dashboard, and refuse to stress over it. I was getting worried about hitting the Protein / fat target macro, but finding it impossible without exceeding the sat fat macro / target.
There is so much new to learn, and old ways of thinking to be reversed.
I will get there, apologies for all the questions 0 -
Hi , thanks for the replies.
The Sat Fat I am eating comes mainly from meat.
I have now removed the sat fat counter from my diary dashboard, and refuse to stress over it. I was getting worried about hitting the Protein / fat target macro, but finding it impossible without exceeding the sat fat macro / target.
There is so much new to learn, and old ways of thinking to be reversed.
I will get there, apologies for all the questions
What about the fat that's not saturated? What kind is it since you said you aren't getting much saturated fat.
I'm wondering if you're choosing the healthy fat options for low carbing. You want to completely avoid any vegetable oils. Stick to coconut, avocado and olive oils.
Also, the MFP standards do not apply to low carb diets. At all. Those guidelines should be ignored. I set my own sat fat goal just it would stop telling me I was exceeding it.
As long as you're getting enough healthy fats to sustain you for energy and happy hormones every day, you don't have to reach the fat goal. The general rule is don't exceed your carbs and try to hit your protein and let fat be up to satiety.0 -
High oleic sunflower oil should be ok as a vegetable oil, but check the polyunsaturated fat before you buy it, because regular sunflower oil is high in omega-6. The one that I buy has more monounsaturated fat than olive oil does, as well as about 1/3 of the PUFAs that olive oil does, and about 1/3 of the omega-6.
I try to substitute monounsaturated fat for saturated fat, while avoiding polyunsaturated fats as much as possible, unless it's omega-3. (Though anyone who looks at my diary will see me eating a lot of saturated fat. I'm having my bloodwork done soon, to see how that is working out).0 -
Also, if you want to look at the fatty acid profile of a type of fat, oil, or any food, the NutritionData website is extremely useful. I always set the portion size to 100 grams, which means that however many grams of saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated fat it shows is also the percentage of that type of fatty acid. You have to scroll down to see the fatty acid profile. I've looked at different animal fats this way too, like lard, beef fat, and chicken fat, all of which contain high percentages of fats other than saturated fat. I hope this is making sense. If not, feel free to ask me. For example, here's the data for high oleic sunflower oil.
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fats-and-oils/623/20 -
Hi,
My fats tend to come from meat, olive oil, dairy, and nuts / seeds. I am only on day two but have been working on a meal planner and look to incorporate some oily fish.
My fats tend to be high saturated, and I posed the question to see if this was okay as I am unable to keep the sat fat below the mfp recommendation. As long as I am not required to keep my sat fat in the green, I don't think it will be a problem0 -
The issue with many nuts is that they're high in the polyunsaturated fat, omega-6 fatty acids, which promote inflammation. That is much less of an issue with olive oil, which is unusually high in monounsaturated fat. My suggestion would be that you let your blood tests for triglycerides and cholesterol be your guide as to whether a diet high in saturated fat is working for you. If your bloodwork is good, after you've been eating this way for about 4 months, you probably don't need to change.0
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Fats that can set on the kitchen counter unsealed until they are consumed like hog lard, butter and coconut oil without going bad is what I prefer in the way of fats.0
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If that's all we ate, wouldn't that make us solid at room temperature?
Luckily, the body will desaturate some SFA to keep us flexible. The most flexible is omega-3 PUFA.
Interestingly, the fastest animals, like hummingbirds, seem to be made of the most omega-3 PUFA. But it's also the most unstable (and oxidized), so those fast animals also have the shortest lifespan.
Everything is a trade-off, it seems.0 -
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LOL0
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If that's all we ate, wouldn't that make us solid at room temperature?
Luckily, the body will desaturate some SFA to keep us flexible. The most flexible is omega-3 PUFA.
Exactly. That's why we're made of a mixture of fatty acids that are viscous, but not too viscous, at normal body temperature. As far as we know, the only fatty acids we can't synthesize in the body are omega-3 and omega-6, (and most people get more than enough omega-6).
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Why would your body store energy in a form that is harmful? It wouldn't.
Well, it also makes glucose, and inflammatory cytokines, and cancer cells....
AFAIK, your body doesn't necessarily store fat as SFA. It will incorporate dietary fat unchanged, except for the esterification.
A lot of the SFA we make endogenously is made from excess carb intake. Apparently not a good thing.
The body doesn't really intentionally make the cancer cells and inflammatory cytokines. Those are "bugs" in the system, so to speak, and a result of poor environmental factors. Garbage in, garbage out.
It makes glucose, but in a very demand-driven method under normal circumstances, and tightly controlled.
Fat, on the other hand, is made...and made....and made. And is made intentionally for use later. It doesn't really make logical or evolutionary sense to make large quantities of fats that cause harm, though it can't really help what fats are assimilated.
As a result, you still see a fairly high percentage of saturated fat in adipose tissue, even in a diet with very little saturated fat, and a fairly high percentage of MUFAs even in a diet with very little of it.
Then, there's the whole thing with SFAs and hormone production and utilization that are optimized by SFA over and above other forms of fats. Hell, the "human jet fuel" that is Lauric Acid, which is also increased in breast milk if made available (compared to the other compounds, which remain largely stable unless the mother is deficient), is a saturated fat.0 -
Yes, we make it for storage, but sometimes it gets stored in the liver or other places it shouldn't, and that seems to cause us lots of problems.
That suggests to me that it's not a matter of SFA Good or SFA Bad, but that we can overload our ability to store it, and it's the overload that screws us. Protein is good in a narrow range. Carbs are good in a narrow range. Why wouldn't the same apply to dietary SFA?0 -
I was reading something about hippo fat yesterday (can't remember why - down the homeschool rabbit hole) and it said that hippos fat is quite different than most animal fats. It will apparently just melt off the bone in the sun.
Wonder what that tastes like....0 -
Yes, we make it for storage, but sometimes it gets stored in the liver or other places it shouldn't, and that seems to cause us lots of problems.
That suggests to me that it's not a matter of SFA Good or SFA Bad, but that we can overload our ability to store it, and it's the overload that screws us. Protein is good in a narrow range. Carbs are good in a narrow range. Why wouldn't the same apply to dietary SFA?
I strongly suspect that you're right. A large part of the problem with typical modern diets is that people eat too much of everything. If there is one thing that evolutionary history has prepared us for, it's periods of caloric scarcity, aka starvation.0 -
@nvmomketo this article suggests that hippos taste a bit like pork and that they don't have as much fat as we'd think. The meat is actually quite
lean.
https://munchies.vice.com/articles/theres-a-possible-upside-to-eating-pablo-escobars-hippos0 -
Yes, we make it for storage, but sometimes it gets stored in the liver or other places it shouldn't, and that seems to cause us lots of problems.
That suggests to me that it's not a matter of SFA Good or SFA Bad, but that we can overload our ability to store it, and it's the overload that screws us. Protein is good in a narrow range. Carbs are good in a narrow range. Why wouldn't the same apply to dietary SFA?
The issues you mention are with fat in general and too much overall. SFAs aren't really unique in that one.0 -
SFA is the one with the bad rap. It hasn't really been exonerated, but I think they're pretty close to understanding why it's bad. Yet another epidemiological study on SFA's came out recently. You and I hate those, I know. But this one looked at SFA's in the blood and mortality. And specifically what chain lengths were associated with the highest mortality.
They found the nasty one. Any guess on chain length?0 -
SFA is the one with the bad rap. It hasn't really been exonerated, but I think they're pretty close to understanding why it's bad. Yet another epidemiological study on SFA's came out recently. You and I hate those, I know. But this one looked at SFA's in the blood and mortality. And specifically what chain lengths were associated with the highest mortality.
They found the nasty one. Any guess on chain length?
I've read that stearic acid, a long chain SFA found in beef, pork, lamb and dairy, is neutral in its effect on LDL, because it's converted readily to monounsaturated fat in the liver. But that is old news. At that time, other long chain SFAs and medium chain SFAs were thought to be more harmful. Do you have a link to the study? I'm curious.0 -
I was starting to think nobody cared.
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/early/2015/12/23/jn.115.222117.long
During 45,450 person-years of follow-up, 3134 deaths occurred. Higher concentrations of the plasma phospholipid
SFAs 18:0, 22:0, and 24:0 were associated with a lower risk of total mortality [multivariable-adjusted HRs (95% CIs)] for the
top compared with the bottom quintile: 0.85 (0.75, 0.95) for 18:0; 0.85 (0.75, 0.95) for 22:0; and 0.80 (0.71, 0.90) for 24:0. In
contrast, plasma 16:0 concentrations in the highest quintile were associated with a higher risk of total mortality compared
with concentrations in the lowest quintile [1.25 (1.11, 1.41)]. We also found no association of plasma phospholipid 20:0 with
total mortality
The ONLY blood SFA associated with increased mortality was 16:0, palmitic acid.
That's right. The primary product of de novo lipogenesis. 0 -
Thank you, @wabmester ! I love looking at the actual fatty acid composition of various foods: got me in all kinds of trouble with my nutrition professor who was an MD, and taught the USDA version of nutrition, not a biochemist.0
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Hmmm. It's hard to avoid palmitic acid AND PUFAs while eating a high fat diet, beyond not eating palm oil.0
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My guess is that you don't have to avoid eating it, but you should avoid making it!
Of course, we can't tell anything about mechanisms or even SFA sources from a study like this one, but my strong suspicion is that the source of 16:0 is from excess carb intake and DNL from the liver. I.e., it's the SFA we make that gets us sick, not the SFA we eat.
However, there are other aspects of dietary SFA that may be a factor. I just posted an Eades article, which is mostly about PUFA, but it'll also explain how SFA impacts insulin sensitivity.0 -
I was starting to think nobody cared.
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/early/2015/12/23/jn.115.222117.long
During 45,450 person-years of follow-up, 3134 deaths occurred. Higher concentrations of the plasma phospholipid
SFAs 18:0, 22:0, and 24:0 were associated with a lower risk of total mortality [multivariable-adjusted HRs (95% CIs)] for the
top compared with the bottom quintile: 0.85 (0.75, 0.95) for 18:0; 0.85 (0.75, 0.95) for 22:0; and 0.80 (0.71, 0.90) for 24:0. In
contrast, plasma 16:0 concentrations in the highest quintile were associated with a higher risk of total mortality compared
with concentrations in the lowest quintile [1.25 (1.11, 1.41)]. We also found no association of plasma phospholipid 20:0 with
total mortality
The ONLY blood SFA associated with increased mortality was 16:0, palmitic acid.
That's right. The primary product of de novo lipogenesis.
Palmitic acid is, as you mentioned, the SFA product of DNL. The underlying cause of the mortality increase, then, could very well be something other than the palmitic acid, itself. The subjects have more of it, because they follow the USDA or a low-fat diet, but are still eating excess calories. One thing to note -- of the non-CVD deaths, cancer and dementia were the most common. You know that's not the conclusion people are going to get from it, but instead are going to go "see? Palmitic acid is bad, and it's in meat, so meat is bad."
Thankfully, the paper itself does mention DNL and low-fat diets, which is cool:In exploratory analyses, we found suggestion that BMI may
influence the relation of 16:0 and mortality; the association of
16:0 with mortality were limited to participants with a BMI
>23.6 (above the 25th percentile for BMI). This was an incidental
finding. Because 16:0 can be synthesized by DNL (5–11),
this finding is plausible if participants with a higher BMI (and at
a higher risk of death) consume low-fat diets.
Here's a gem for you, though:Interestingly, when we subclassified types of death (i.e., non-CVD
deaths, CVD deaths) in secondary analyses, the associations of
16:0 and 18:0 and total mortality were stronger for non-CVD
than CVD deaths, whereas the associations of 22:0 and 24:0 were
driven by both non-CVD and CVD deaths. This finding is
difficult to explain and supports the need for further investigation
of the associations of individual SFAs on disease risk.
In other words, more people died of just about anything, but when separating the two, CVD mortality wasn't actually much different. If you look at Tables 2 and 3, CVD deaths for Palmitic and Stearic Acid are actually lower than the others, so they died of other stuff.0
This discussion has been closed.