Good Fats, Bad Fats – Which Ones Are You Eating?

Are you eating good fats or bad fats?

Bad fats can lead to high cholesterol levels, inflammation, weight gain and poor mental performance … so let’s explore what they are!

I talk about fats in this video:

Good Fats, Bad Fats …

So you are eating what you believe is a healthy diet, but could it be that some of the fats in your diet are bad fats and actually damaging your health?

Fat is a macronutrient, together with protein and carbohydrate, and is essential for your health.

Now, we all need a certain amount of fat in our diet to be healthy.

And these types of fats called omega 3 and 6 you must get from the foods that you eat.

So, what are the bad fats?

Trans fats

If you eat what are called trans fats, then these are bad fats and are known to promote elevated LDL cholesterol levels, increasing your risk of suffering from heart disease. (1)

You’ll find bad fats like trans fats in animal products like ice cream, cheese and beef.

Yet in a vegan diet there can also be trans fats.

You’ll find trans fats in foods like baked foods, fried foods, cakes, biscuits and margarine.

So these kinds of fats you definitely want to avoid.

Saturated fats

Another fat known as saturated fat and viewed by many health experts as a “bad” fat.

It has the potential to be problematic and raise your cholesterol levels, increasing your risk of suffering from heart disease. (2)

Foods that are high in saturated fat include animal products, like cheese, ice cream and beef. (3)

So keeping your saturated fat intake low is a very good idea.

Now there is of course coconut oil, which many people believe to be health promoting, yet scientific evidence points to coconut oil being the exact opposite and that it can in fact damage your arteries. (5)

And believe it or not even coconut milk has been shown to negatively impact on your arterial health. (6)

We have worked with a lot of clients who thought that coconut milk was amazing for their bodily health, including their thyroid, and they needed to consume it every single day.

Yet they never actually balanced their health issues despite using it.

When we worked together with these clients and created a healthy raw or a high raw, high-carb lifestyle plan for them, their health issues quickly improve.

So ideally you are best eating the coconut itself which includes all the other nutrients with it.

When it comes to oils of any kind, you really are best avoiding these bad fats as they are basically 100% fat and a very unbalanced food product and that goes for cold pressed oils as well.

You can see a couple of other videos we made about oils here and here.

Good fats

The healthy fats that are those found in whole plant foods so that means avocados, nuts, seeds and olives.

Whole plant foods in general all contain fat to a lesser or greater degree, including fruits and veggies.

So let’s do a quick recap about what I talked about in this video:

• Keep your total fat intake low, with the majority of your calories coming from whole plant food carbohydrates which should include plenty of raw foods.
• Get your fats from whole plant foods, such as seeds, nuts, avocados etc., and avoid the bad fats in processed vegan foods which includes those that use oils and oils themselves even raw/cold pressed oils.
• Make sure that you have a well-balanced omega 6 to 3 ratio of 4:1 or less as too much of an imbalance of omega 6 to 3 causes inflammation.

Are you eating good fats or bad fats? Leave your comments below!

Sources:

       (1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125015/

       (2) https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/resources/heart/heart-cholesterol-hbc-what-html

       (3) https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/types-of-fat/

       (4) https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/resources/2015-2020_Dietary_Guidelines.pdf

       (5)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8833174

       (6) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11603133