Choosing Healthy Fats

Not all fats are bad for you, some fats are essential for your body and some fats are actually healthy for the body. It’s just that you need to figure out what the healthy fats are and what not. Fat is just a type of nutrient like protein, carbo hydrate or iron, our body needs healthy fats to absorb vitamins and protect our brain and heart from different diseases. All these years we have been told that eating fats can make you gain weight but nobody tells the truth that right kind of fat is important for the body and should be included in the diet. A lot of people stop eating fats, including both bad and healthy fats just to reduce weight but they don’t know that sometimes they are skipping necessary nutrients, which may lead to lower energy levels. Before knowing how to choose healthy fats, let’s find out the types of fat first.

Saturated Fats

The kind of fat that sticks around is saturated fat. Generally, the saturated fats are solid and greasy at room temperature and turn liquid when heated. It is because the presence of hydrogen makes it saturated, that is exactly what you should avoid at any cost. This is the unhealthiest kind of fat that you could consume, normally found in animal products, like beef steak, and pork. Eating saturated fats can increase your cholesterol levels and lead to numerous health diseases along with fatness.

Monounsaturated Fats

Monounsaturated fat is the healthy kind of fat, in fact it is healthy for you to include in your diet. This fat turns liquid at room temperature since it is missing one of the hydrogen present in saturated fats. When placed at a lower temperature, these fats turn mushy solid. Researches have shown that consuming monounsaturated fats can protect you from different heart diseases, cancer, cholesterol problems, and high blood sugar levels. In fact, it is confirmed in the recent researches that monounsaturated fats stabilise the blood flow in your body and make you feel better and more energetic. Despite every benefit of this fat, it should not be consumed more than 30 percent in your daily diet.

Polyunsaturated fats

Polyunsaturated fats are missing more than one hydrogen atom which makes them liquid even in lower temperatures. The health factors related to these fats are still under studies and this is not yet confirmed that either these fats are healthy or not.

Essential Fatty Acids

These fats are related to polyunsaturated fats and include two kinds of fats, omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. Although both of these fats are important for our reproductive, immune, and nervous systems our bodies cannot produce them naturally, we must take them from our daily nutrient intake. Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids can be found in walnuts, flax, pumpkin seeds, soybeans, fish and olive oil.

Trans-Fatty Acids

This is the real monster you should be afraid of. Trans fat is totally un natural and produced by different un natural processes in the laboratory like hydrogenation, where liquid fats are forced to to turn into solids. Although these fats are strictly banned but they can still be found in fried foods, packaged and processed foods. These fats have high calories and sugar which make you gain weight very fast. Foods that contain trans fat are:

• Baked items including cookies, cakes, muffins, pie crusts, pizza, crackers and other breads like burger’s buns.
• Fried foods like potato fries, fried chicken, chicken nuggets, fry bread and hard taco shells
• Snacks including potatoes, salted/caramel packaged popcorns, and tortilla chips
• Margarine and semi-solid vegetable shortening
• Pre-mixed and frozen products

Before you eat anything you should check its fat type and amount, although it is very confusing to remember chemistry stuff when you’re in the grocery store, you can still get healthy fats just by remembering a few facts. Anything that comes out of some plant has a lot of fat and it’s probably the healthy one, such as olive and soybean. Highly packaged food and high fat animal products are truly not healthy. While breaking up with artificial trans fats, make sure you read food labels.