Good Fats, Bad Fats

With the food industry’s obsession with everything ’fat-free’ you would think that fat was bad for you. Well some fats are bad for you, especially consuming high levels of saturated fat and unhealthy trans fats. These can often be found in processed and packaged foods, takeaways, snacks, cakes, biscuits and sweets.
But there are some fats that are absolutely essential for good health … so essential that they are actually called Essential Fatty Acids (EFA’s). Your body can’t make them so you need to include these EFA’s in your diet. They can be found in nutritious foods like nuts, seeds, oily fish and avocados.

Unsaturated Fats - Essential Fatty Acids

EFA’s are the good fats and vitally important for many functions in the body, contributing to lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, nourishing our reproductive organs, hair, skin and bone tissue. They help decrease inflammation and pain, supporting our immune and nervous system and even helping our body use stored fat.

There are two basic categories of EFA's (essential fatty acids)

Omega 3 EFA

(Linolenic Acid) is found in oily fish - like salmon, sardines, mackerel and tuna. Vegetable and seed oils - canola oil, walnut oil, flaxseed oil (also known as Linseed). Flax seeds which also contribute essential roughage to the diet.
The modern diet is more likely to be low in Omega 3 than Omega 6.

Omega 6 EFA

(Linoleic Acid) Omega 6 is found in raw nuts and seeds, and their oils especially pumpkin, sunflower and soya beans.
EFA’s should never be heated or used to fry food as they convert into ‘bad’ fats this way. A great way to include them into your diet is to use them in salad dressings, on food once it has been cooked and of course eat the seeds and nuts as a snack or mix into your food.

Saturated Fats

Saturated fats are mostly from animal sources, but are also found in tropical oils like palm and coconut oils. They are usually solid at room temperature. Saturated fatty acids are found in breast milk, and are essential for infants and toddlers.
Many adults and now children have too much saturated fat in their body due to a poor and unhealthy diet. But our body does need some saturated fat as long as it is in balance – about one third of fat intake can be saturated as long as you have a balance of the ‘good’ EFA fats in your diet. People with a deficiency of saturated fats in their white blood cells (T cells) eventually show a decline in immune function.

Trans Fats

If vegetable oils are hydrogenated or processed, for example as in the manufacture of margarine, the oil is converted into trans-fatty acids. These are not beneficial to the body and can have a negative effect on cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease. Trans-fats can also block the body’s absorption and use of health-boosting EFA’s.
According to reviews of all the data trans fatty acids have been shown to raise low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or ‘bad’) cholesterol in the blood and lower high-density lipoprotein (HDL, or ‘good’) cholesterol, leading to greater risks of heart disease and stroke (J Am Coll Nutr, 1996; 15: 325–39).