How Healthy Are Fats?

Over the last ten years, dietary fats have achieved a bad name in our culture. The result of this is that people have started to decrease their intake of fat dramatically.

Almost at once, a completely new industry has developed to produce an almost endless variety of fat free or low fat products to tempt people who want to reduce their fat intake. However, removing all the fat from food also reduces most of its taste appeal, so manufacturers compensate for this by adding all sorts of enhancers and sugar. The result of this is that people weigh more than ever and are even more unhealthy.

So this phenomenon has just not worked, and in fact, following a low or no fat diet to the letter over a sustained length of time can give you some quite serious consequences health-wise.

In general, fat is not bad for you, it is just certain fats that you should reduce in your diet, and there are others that should be regularly included. A general rule of thumb is that we should get twenty five percent of our daily calorie intake from fat, and of that amount, ten percent should be saturated fat.

For years, we have been told that saturated fat is bad and unsaturated fat is good for us, however it is slightly more complicated than that.

Saturated fats include items such as butter and lard, and unsaturated fats include products like peanut and olive oil. People tend to presume that saturated fat comes just from animal sources, however that is incorrect. Palm and coconut oil are saturated fats. Even more confusing, not all animal fats are saturated. One example is beef, which has a bad reputation because it is presumed that all its fat is saturated. Actually most of the fat in beef is unsaturated, and it also includes fatty acids which may be beneficial to your health.

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