What are healthy fats?
Saturated fats should be embraced not feared
Saturated fats are an essential part of our cells, a huge component of our brains and perform many vital functions in our bodies. We need them for our immune system and for transportation of fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K). Diets low in saturated fat are often deficient in these vitamins.
We can’t live without saturated fats and have been happily eating them in our natural food sources for millennia.
It is also important to point out that all natural foods contain a mixture of the different types of fats. Olive oil, which is known for having a high proportion of monounsaturated fats, actually has plenty of saturated fat in addition. You can see this when olive oil goes cloudy at cooler temperatures, which is the saturated fat solidifying. So it is impossible to consume unsaturated fat without saturated fat in natural food.
We also talk about some foods being ‘full’ of saturated fat like butter and red meat. Steak is in fact not full of it at all! Raw steak is only around 7% fat, the rest comprising mainly water and protein, and only 2% is saturated fat.
The diet-heart hypothesis
The prevailing wisdom on dietary fats, from the diet-heart hypothesis, goes something like this. Eating saturated fats we associate with foods like butter raises our cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart disease by clogging up our arteries and causing plaques. Whilst this hypothesis might sound sensible it lacks compelling evidence and credibility among the scientific community.
For a start there is no relationship between how much saturated fat we consume and the levels of cholesterol in our body. And whilst cholesterol is found in plaques it didn’t cause them. Much like fire engines being present at a fire doesn’t lead us to conclude that the fire was caused by the fire engine!
I will save a cholesterol discussion for another post but the take out is that saturated fat has a bad reputation it doesn’t deserve, stemming from a flawed hypothesis and political influence that reaches back to the 1960s and 70s.
Vegetable oils are not natural human food
Seed oils, that we often call vegetable oils, such as sunflower, rapeseed and sesame oil, are made in factories in a long series of processes. Oil is extracted from the seeds using mechanical and chemical means and then needs to be made palatable, safe for human consumption and stable on a supermarket shelf. Anything but natural as you can see from the visual below.
Vegetable oils have high levels of omega 6 fatty acids in them, which whilst essential are pro-inflammatory in large amounts working against the anti-inflammatory benefits of omega 3. Another essential fatty acid we need to obtain from our food that is found in meat, fish, eggs and algae.
We evolved to thrive on a diet that had a ratio of around 3:1 omega 6 to omega 3 and in today’s vegetable oil focused world this has changed to be a ratio of around 15:1 which is really not good for our health.
Vegetable oils are used in ultra-processed foods giving these a double metabolic whammy of inflammatory oils combined with low nutrient density ingredients. Best avoided as much as possible!
Hear more about this directly from Nina Teicholtz in this short clip on the myth of vegetable oils: https://www.dietdoctor.com/the-myth-of-vegetable-oils
Which fats should we be eating?
Natural fats with a higher proportion of saturated fat are the best for us to eat - think butter, coconut oil and extra virgin olive oil. These are also the most stable fats at high temperatures so best for cooking.
In comparison to the industrially produced vegetable oils here is a lovely picture of our local Napton Water Buffalo happily grazing a grassy field making buffalo milk and steak in their own biological factories.
Eating fat doesn’t make you fat
Just because they share the same name, eating natural healthy fats is not the culprit for our obesity problem. It is the sugar, refined carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods with their vegetable oils that should take the blame.
Eating natural fats doesn’t spike our insulin levels and combined with a lower carbohydrate diet will facilitate us eating to satiety, able to use the energy we have taken in or already have stored as body fat.
One final link for those who want to see more of the evidence is from a recent PHC conference. A talk by an Australian doctor, Paul Mason, on Why Your Doctor is Wrong about Fat: https://youtu.be/FRZGgO4MxRU
Enjoy chicken liver pâté, one of the most nutritious foods and a favourite of mine, with a clear conscience. Yum!
