Good and bad fat
I’ve heard for most of my life now that fat in our diet is bad and that fat will make me fat and unwell.
In the last 2 years I have had to revisit this idea and I have had to reason that this is not the case all of the time.
There are good fats and bad fats though and we have to learn to distinguish between them.
The key I found to unlock the puzzle so to speak was to understand where fat in our diet comes from.
Fats that are a product of recent and modern food processing tend to have had a lot of things done to them to give us the illusion of them being natural oils and fats. An early introduction I had to this was in Chemistry class at school where I was introduced to the idea of hydrogenated vegetable fat being used to make margarine. I believe that this manufactured product has been for the most part banned in the UK but I can’t be absolutely sure.
Food processing and the creation of things we take to be food have developed over the years and for all I know, hydrogenated vegetable fat is still being used in some products but by a different name.
The propensity for commercial food producers to create things that look like food but are not is in my view breath taking.
So I have taken a rule of thumb to be that fat that is a product of traditional, low tech food processing, so things that have been with us for 100s or 1000s of years are good fats and fats that are a product of modern food processing are bad fats.
When it comes to oils, I avoid any heavily processed oil such as vegetable, nut or seed based oils. I also avoid any oil that has been repeatedly heated to a high temperature.
Fat that comes from meat, fish, eggs and dairy and that have not undertaken heavy processing I will seek to include in my diet.
Plant based fats from olives and olive oil and avocadoes I find to be good options.
Nuts are a bit of a quandary for me as I tend to over eat them if I’m not careful so I’ve cut down on them a lot now but certain nuts, such as peanuts I avoid like the plague as they tend to be heavily processed.
So what is the effect of eating good fats ?
I have found that I feel fuller for longer and I no longer have hunger pangs. I have also found that my blood sugars are more stable. In the early days of adopting this life choice I had less cravings for sugar, however I don’t at all want for sugar now.