What to eat part 3 – Three things you don’t know about FAT.

1. It’s not your enemy.

The first thing I want to talk about, how fat is not your enemy. Seriously – we’ve been fed a line of goods on fat, and it’s a story that has been told for decades now. We’ve been told it’s our enemy. The lipid theory of heart disease has been presented as if it was solid, proven fact. It goes something like this:

When you eat fat and cholesterol it enters your bloodstream. After entering your blood, it deposits in your arteries – actually lines your arteries, and plugs them up. It’s just like dumping hot fat down a drain. It just plugs it right up and boom, totally blocks the flow. If this happens in your arteries, in a very short time you have a heart attack. Bam. Killed by fat.

Quick problem with this story though. It’s never been proven. (Well, actually it’s been disproven, since this really isn’t how fat works in your body) There’s been the occasional epidemiological study here and there that shows that there may be some connection to fat and heart disease – and other epidemiological studies that show there’s no connection.

Is it science?

Now when I first studied the scientific method I learned it’s supposed to work like this:

Step one – come up with a theory of how something works.

Two – set up as many experiments as you can to prove that you are wrong.

Step three – if none of the experiments to prove you are wrong work, then your theory is probably right. If one of them proves it wrong, then it’s wrong.

With the lipid theory of heart disease that’s not how it’s been done. It seems like the system is looking for consensus. “Well, sure there are 87 studies that show it’s wrong, but there are still 93 that show it might be right – so we’re sticking with it for now.”

Does that seem right to you?

2. It’s your friend.

The second thing you need to know about fat, it’s actually your friend. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this term before, essential fatty acids. That means that some fats are essential for your health, you can’t live without them. How weird is that?

We’ve talked about Omega-3, Omega-6, Omega-9 before. Omega-3 fatty acids are essential to our diet, and it’s very difficult with our western diet to get enough of them. It’s especially hard to get enough to balance our omega 6 and 9 ratios. This means that omega 3 is something that you need to supplement with  unless you’re eating a lot of wild fish, or wild/grass fed meat.

Eat fat and get fat? Perhaps not.

Feeling fat?  We used to be told that if you eat fat, it’s going to make you fat. This idea came from the fact that in each gram of fat there’s nine calories. Now, you can contrast that with protein or carbohydrate, where for each gram of that, there’s only four calories. So if you’re eating more fat, then you would think, oh, you’re going to pack on the pounds.

Fat’s saving grace, though, is that it turns off your appetite, so if you eat fat, you feel a lot more full than if you’re just eating protein and especially if you’re just eating carbohydrates. If you think about it, if you have something really light for breakfast, so you have a big bowl of cereal, very soon you’re going to be hungry. But if you have something with fat in it, it lasts. It sticks with you a lot longer.

If you’re questioning this, ask yourself “how do you fatten up a cow?”. You don’t feed it fat to make it fat, you feed it grain.

Evil, rotten, horrible, deadly cholesterol

Now, the whole cholesterol theory of heart disease is so huge we’re going to have to cover it in future posts but know that there is some question about it. There are plenty of studies showing it just is not true. Did you know that your body makes 75% of the cholesterol in your blood right now? Either cholesterol is bad, and your body is suicidal, or cholesterol is something your body actually NEEDS. More on that in a future blog, but for now think about it this way.

If you walk by a dumpster and see a whole bunch of flies right around all that garbage, do you think to yourself, “Whoa, look at all the garbage that those flies made. Those flies must have created all that garbage because the flies are everywhere.” That would be jumping to conclusions. The flies didn’t actually cause the garbage – they are there because of the garbage. In the same way, just because there’s cholesterol in your arteries and when you have a heart attack doesn’t mean cholesterol is causing the heart attack.

3. Where to get it (and where NOT to.)

So where do you get good, healthy fat? Some of the best sources of fat include fish, red meat (yes, horrible evil red meat – more on that in another post too!), lard,  coconut oil, olive oil, butter, ghee, and even in nuts and seeds.

What fats are bad? One of the worst fats on the planet would be margarine. In order to make liquid vegetable oil into something like butter takes a lot of processing, making it a man-made fat that no one should be eating. Eating your foods as close to their natural state as possible is always ideal.

Other bad fats include seed oils (again, highly processed, GMO, toxic oils) like canola, sunflower,  that have all been shown to be pro inflammatory. Avoid them.

Pesky ol’ neuropathy.

One of the problems with the suggested diet for diabetics is it contains lots of carbohydrates and not enough healthy fats. This is one of the factors leading to the current explosion in type 2 diabetes and diabetic neuropathy. Believe me, there are things you can do to stop and reverse this!