This is an exert out of the Abs Diet book by David Zinczenko that I have been reading. It covers why our bodies need some dietary fat but why to avoid trans fat and saturated fat. It also covers the healthy types of fats, but it was starting to look like a novel, so I will keep that for another blog if you are interested!
Basically I have been tracking my trans fat intake using sparkpeople.com. I haven’t run into anything that has trans fats in…I look for the partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients and avoid buying foods with that in. I think it is in M&Ms but I only have them once in a while. This covers why this type of fat is so dangerous and should be avoided.
I also started tracking my saturated fat intake as well (I know, I am obsessive) but I have a goal this week on reducing my saturated fat intake…but I figured someone might be interested in all of this information so I am posting it here (it is long)
Related articles:
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?id=60
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?id=607
Fat: Underrated, Understand?
When you think of fat, you probably think of foods that have a lot of fat—or people who do. After a few years with some extra pounds, the only thing you know about fat is that you’re tired of it and want to get rid of it forever. But it’s probably one of your body’s most misunderstood dietary nutrients, stemming from a widely held but misguided belief that fat should take much of the blame for our obesity epidemic.
In the 1980s, the U.S. government released nutritional guidelines that essentially said we should base our diets on potatoes, rice, cereal, and pasta and minimize the foods with a lot of fat and protein. That gave way to the idea that fat makes you fat and that gave way to a new breed of diets that said if you limit the fat in what you eat, you’ll limit the fat that exercises squatter’s rights on your belly. But that line of thinking didn’t hold out when researchers tried to find links between low-fat diets and obesity. In 1988 for example, two prominent obesity researchers estimated that if you took only 10 percent of your calories from fat, you’d lose 16 grams of fat a day—a loss of 50 pounds in a year. But when a Harvard epidemiologist, Walter Willett, tried to find evidence that this occurred, he couldn’t find any link between people who lost weight and the fact that they were on a low-fat diet. In fact, some studies lasting a year or more, groups of people showed weight gains on low-fat diets. Willet speculated that there was a mechanism responsible for this: when the body is on a low-fat diet for a long period, it stops losing weight.
Part of the reason our bodies rebel against low-fat diets is that we need fat. For instance, fat plays a vital role in the delivery of vitamins A, D, E, and K, nutrients stored in fatty tissue and the liver until your body needs them. Fat also helps produce testosterone, which helps trigger muscle growth. And fat, like protein, helps keep you satisfied and controls your appetite. In fact, if we’ve learned anything about weight loss over the past several years, it’s that reducing your fat intake doesn’t necessarily do a darn thing to decrease your body fat. One small study, for instance, compared a high-carbohydrate diet with a high-fat diet. The researchers found that the group with the high-fat diet experienced less muscle loss than the other group. The researchers theorized that muscle protein was being spared by the higher-fat diet because fatty acids, more so than carbs, were being harnessed and used for energy.
The truth is that reasonable amounts of fat can actually help you lose weight. In a study from the International Journal of Obesity, researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School put 101 overweight people on either a low-fat diet (fat was 20 percent of the total calories) or a moderate-fat diet (35 percent of calories) and followed them for 18 months. Both groups lost weight at first, but after a year and a half, the moderate-fat group had lost an average of 9 pounds per person whereas the low-fat dieters had gained 6 pounds. The results suggest that a healthy amount of fat is a factor in keeping your weight under control.
Here’s a primer on the fats in your life.
Trans fat: BAD more and more, you’re seeing trans fats listed on food labels. Though it’s in more than 40,000 packaged foods, it’s so bad for you that food manufacturers have fought for years to keep it off ingredient labels. In 2003, the US Food and Drug Administration finally adopted regulations requiring manufacturers include trans fat content on their packaging. The regulations will be phased in over the next few years. For now, you have to be a smart food consumer to spot where the danger lies.
Trans fats were invented by grocery manufacturers in the 1950s as a way of appealing to our natural cravings for fatty foods. But there’s nothing natural about trans fats. They’re cholesterol-raising, heart-weakening, diabetes-causing, belly-building chemicals that, for the most part, didn’t even exist until the middle of the last century, and some studies have linked them to an estimated 30,000 premature deaths in this country every year. In one Harvard study, researchers found that getting just 3 percent of your daily calories from trans fats increased your risk of heart disease by 50 percent. Three percent of your daily calories equals about 7 grams of trans fats; that’s roughly the amount of a single order of fries. Americans eat an average of between 3 and 10 grams of trans fats every day.
To understand what trans fats are, picture a bottle of vegetable oil and a stick of margarine. At room temperature, the vegetable oil is a liquid, the margarine a solid. Now, if you baked cookies using vegetable oil, they’d be pretty greasy. And who would want to buy a cooking swimming in oil? So to create cookies—and cakes, nachos, chips, pies, muffins, doughnuts, waffles, and many, many other foods we consume daily—manufacturers heat the oil to very high temperatures with the oil to create an entirely new form of fat—trans fat—that stays solid at room temperature. Vegetable oil becomes margarine. And now foods that might normally be healthy—but maybe not as tasty—become fat bombs.
Since these trans fats don’t exist in nature, your body has a hell of a time processing them. Once consumed, trans fats are free to cause all sorts of mischief inside you. They raise the number of LDL (bad) cholesterol particles in your bloodstream and lower your HDL (good) cholesterol. They also raise blood levels of other lipoproteins; the more lipoprotein you have in your bloodstream, the greater your risk of heart disease. Increased consumption of trans fats has also been linked to increased risk of diabetes and cancer.
Yet trans fats are added to a shocking number of foods. They appear on food labels as PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL—usually vegetable or palm oil. Go look in your pantry and freezer right now, and you won’t believe how many foods include them. Crackers. Popcorn. Cookies. Fish sticks. Cheese spreads. Candy bars. Frozen waffles. Stuffing. Even foods you might assume are healthy—like bran muffins, cereals, and nondairy creamers—are often loaded with trans fats. And because they hide in foods that look like they’re low in fat, such as Wheat Thins, these trans fats are making you unhealthy without your even knowing it.
Take control of your trans fat intake. Check the ingredient labels on all the packaged foods you buy, and if you see PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL on the label, consider finding an alternative. Even foods that seem bad for you can have healthier versions: McCains shoestrong French fries, Ruffles Natural reduced-fat chips, Wheatables reduce-fat crackers, and Dove dark chocolate bars are just a few of the “bad for you snacks” that are actually free of trans fats. And remember-the higher up on the ingredients list PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL is, the worse the food is for you. You might not be able to avoid trans fats entirely, but you can choose foods with a minimal amount of the stuff.
The other way to avoid trans fats is to avoid ordering fried foods. Because trans fats spoil less easily than natural fats and are easier to ship and store, almost all fried commercial foods are now fried in trans fats rather than natural oils. Fish and chips, tortillas, fried chicken—all of it is packed with belly-building trans fats. Order food baked or broiled whenever possible. And avoid fast-food joints, where nearly every food option is loaded with trans fats; drive-through restaurants ought to come complete with drive-through cardiology clinics.
Saturated fat: BAD Saturated fats are naturally occurring fats found in meat and dairy products. The problem with saturated fats is that when they enter your body, they tend to do the same thing they did when they were in a pig’s or cow’s body: Rather than be burned for energy, they’re more likely to be stored as fat in your flanks, in your ribs, even—ugh—in your loin. In fact, they seem to have more of a “storage effect” than other fats. A new study from John Hopkins University suggests that the amount of saturated fat in your diet may be directly proportional to the amount of fat surrounding your abdominal muscles. Researchers analyzed the diets of 84 people and performed an MRI on each of them to measure fat. Those whose diets included the highest rates of saturated fats also had the most abdominal fat. Saturated fats also raise cholesterol levels, so they increase your risk for heart disease and some types of cancer. I don’t want you to eliminate saturated fats entirely; they’re found in most animal products, and those food products are important for the Abs Diet for other reasons (the calcium in dairy products, the protein in meat). But I do want you to consume the low-fat and leaner versions of meat and dairy products. You want the nutritional benefit from one part of the food without high amounts of saturated fat.
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