The most dreaded word in many dieter’s vocabulary is ‘fat’. It is not uncommon to hear a dieter discuss their avoidance of eating fat as if it were something thoroughly unwholesome or even life-threatening like an allergen or a contagious disease.
In one way this impassioned hatred of fat is positive. It reflects a generally understood medical truth that overindulging in fat-rich foods often causes unwanted and unhealthy weight gain.
However in another way this fat-phobia is potentially dangerous because awareness of fat is not enough; an understanding of how fat influences weight gain and overall health is required. Unfortunately those who dread and avoid all fat “as a rule” are overlooking an important difference between saturated fat and unsaturated fat.
Saturated fat is often the real culprit when it comes to unwanted and potentially unhealthy weight gain. These types of fats which are solid at room temperature initiate the production of LDL cholesterol or “bad cholesterol”. In addition to weight gain as cholesterol increases so does the risk of heart disease. In fact saturated fats increase LDL cholesterol disproportionately more than dietary cholesterol itself; that is how powerfully bad it is to the human body[i]. Dreading and avoiding this kind of fat is therefore quite intelligent.
Some dieters however are motivated less by concerns about high cholesterol and heart disease than they are about cosmetic weight gain. This is not a criticism; the adverse health effects of excess weight are well documented as are the emotional traumas and social stigmas that tragically affect tens of millions of overweight people especially children[ii].
Unquestionably an excess intake of saturated fat is linked to weight gain. This is because a fat gram contains more than twice the amount of calories as a protein gram – 9 calories versus 4 calories[iii]. As a result dieters can eat more than twice as many protein grams as fat grams to achieve the same amount of caloric intake. For dieters who are steadfastly watching every calorie this 125% calorie difference between protein and fat can have an enormous impact.
Fat cells once created cannot be removed[1]; they can only be made smaller through the body’s metabolic calorie-burning process[iv]. Since an individual’s rate of metabolism is determined largely by genetics a dieter with a slower than average metabolism will spend months perhaps even years longer struggling to shrink fat cells then would his or her metabolically-gifted counterpart[v].
It is quite easy to understand based on the above discussion why the very idea of fat is dreaded by dieters; both because of the health hazards it poses and its capacity to create excess fat cells. And it is just as easy to understand why many people are so afraid of consuming this kind of fat that they strive to remove all fat from their diet. This however is a large nutritional oversight.
Fat is a macronutrient that the body requires for a number of important functions. Fat is a source of energy. It helps keep the body warm it aids in the absorption of some vitamins and helps regulate the proper functioning of the brain and nervous system[vi]. This appears however to be a ...
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