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What Kind of Fat Can You Eat?
By: Renee Kennedy
Research has shown that you not only need to watch
the "amount" of fat that you eat in your diet, but also
the "types" of fat you eat. This article will help you
minimize the negative effects that fat has on your health.
1. Basic Terms:
- "Bad" cholesterol clogs your arteries and causes
heart disease.
- "Good" cholesterol helps collect up the bad
cholesterol and get it out of your system.
- Saturated fat is "bad fat" that increases the bad cholesterol
in your body.
- Polyunsaturated fat is "good fat" that lowers both
good and bad cholesterol.
- Monounsaturated fat is "really good fat" that helps
lower the bad cholesterol, but leaves the good cholesterol
alone.
- Fatty acids are the building blocks of fat.
- Trans fatty acids are made in the production of partially
hydrogenated vegetable oils used to make margarine
and many snack foods and processed foods.
- Whole foods are unprocessed food that occur in nature...
nuts, meat, milk, poultry, eggs, fish, seeds, grains, rice, fruits,
vegetables.
2. Why Fat is Bad:
Fat is calorie-dense, it contains more than twice the number
of calories as carbohydrates. A high fat diet has been linked
to several chronic diseases such as cancer and increased
risk of coronary heart disease. Saturated fats can increase
bad cholesterol.
3. Why Fat is Good:
It gives taste and texture to foods. Unsaturated fats
can decrease the bad cholesterol in your body.
4. How Fat in Your Diet Affects You:
Fat in your food can affect you differently depending on
your particular health issues.
If you are at risk for heart disease,
saturated fat is something you want to avoid. According to
the American Heart Association, a heart healthy
diet can contain up to 30% of calories from fat, as long as
most of the fat is unsaturated. More on the heart-healthy
diet: http://www.nutricounter.com/articles/garrett3.htm
If you are diabetic, you want to lower the trans fatty acids and
raise the polyunsaturated fatty acids. Consider reducing the
amount of processed foods and increasing the amount of whole
foods you consume. More on the diabetic diet:
http://www.nutricounter.com/articles/garrett4.htm
If you are on a diet to lose weight, it's a good idea to lower
total fat in your diet. Losing weight comes down to
the calories in versus calories out and fat has more than
twice the amount of calories as other foods.
5. Types of Fat You Should Choose:
- Polyunsaturated fats are found in flax, corn, safflower, soybean,
sesame, and sunflower oils. (These nonhydrogenated fats are
liquid at room temperature.)
- Polyunsaturated fats found in fish.
- Monounsaturated fats found in olive oil and canola oil.
Read this article for more information on fat in animal meats:
http://www.nutricounter.com/articles/howard1.htm
6. Types of Fat You Should Try to Avoid:
- Any type of hydrogenated fat. This is man-made fat and
you will find it in snack foods, margarine, bakery products and
other processed foods.
- Man made fat substitutes like Olestra (you might find fat
substitutes in fat free snack foods). Even if scientific research
could solidly prove that fat substitutes weren't hazardous
to your health, these products just perpetrate bad eating habits.
- Animal fats including whole milk, butter, poultry skin, and fatty
cuts of meat.
Fat doesn't have to be a bad thing if you choose your
fat wisely! If you can choose whole foods over process foods,
you will be eating a much healthier diet. Also, for any type of
special diet, use your NutriCounter
(http://www.nutricounter.com) to help you
keep track of your total fat and saturated fat intake.
About the Author
Come and visit the NutriCounter web site for more
information on how nutrition influences weight loss, diabetes, pregnancy, heart disease and more!
http://www.nutricounter.com
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How to Benefit from the Mind-Body Connection
(excerpt)
You are about to gain insight into the
mind-body connection. The number of
people who truly understand these principles on our
planet are relatively few.
There is an undeniable connection between our minds and
bodies, you can learn to use this fact to your benefit.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine and
Miracles" was once a distraught cancer surgeon until he
began to understand the greater principles of the mind-
body connection. He felt dragged down by the artificial
barriers that existed between patient and doctor, and the
helplessness he often felt as a result of his inability
to effectively serve those patients. Eventually, those
barriers were disintegrated by Dr. Siegel's recognition
and growing understanding of the mind-body connection and
how it could serve his patients and himself.
Dr. Siegel, or Bernie as he began to have his patients
refer to him, had some
startling realizations as a cancer surgeon. He found that
there were actually
quite a few people in the world that successfully beat
the statistics on cancer
survival. He began to recognize that a patient's ability
to defeat something as
serious as cancer had to do with the patient's mind and
attitude about their
disease.
If you would like to see the rest of
this article, please go here:
http://www.tobeinformed.com/repository/mind-body.html
copyright 2004 - David Snape
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