Fat is essential for complement your daily diet, and keep your health during your life. You cannot avoid consuming fat because it recharges your energy and helps with the absorption of some fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin A, D, E and K.
Also your body uses omega-3 and omega-6 fats for your growth and also nerves, brain and eyes’ development. But we are not talking about any kind of fat; while unsaturated fat provides many benefits for your health, you should avoid or limit quite hard all saturated fat and trans fat.
What You Really Should Avoid?
We really know that eating some fries is something awesome, but we need to avoid eating this kind of meals often because it has saturated and trans fat that are unhealthy and provides more problems than benefits.
But first we want to talk you about these bad fats you should reduce or limit:
1. Saturated Fats
Usually you can find saturated fat on hydrogenated oils, fat foods, butter, animal fats, chocolate, lard, palm oil, coconut oil, cheese and some baked goods. Consuming often saturated fats can increase your risk for complicated diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, liver diseases, high cholesterol and obesity. For that reason experts have recommended to people that should avoid over-consumption of theses meals and set a limit for consume, which means that you should eat saturated fats just about a 7% to 10% each day.
Saturated fat is part of a group of fatty acids, and every of these have its own natural properties and characteristics. Then, some of the meals we mention before contain saturated fatty acids but it does not mean that you should avoid it completely because some of these may be healthy for you, while others do not. But all up to you, however, we are sure that you can make better diet choices with all this information.
To sum up, many meals with potential saturated fats gives you some health benefits; usually had been associated incorrectly with increased risks of heart diseases and even cancer but all evidence is controversial and nothing is 100% accurate until now.
Nevertheless, nothing about over-consumption is good, so we suggest you to limit the intake of meals with saturated fats content. You do no need to eliminate completely, so do not worry because you still can eat delicious bacon whenever you want, just try to do not eat it every day.
Besides, never change or replace anything we show you on this list with trans fats, such as using margarine instead of butter, since trans fats really are even worse for your health than natural saturated fats.
2. Trans Fat
Trans fats or artificial unsaturated fats are created artificially because are uncommon in nature, that may give us a clue about the risks around eat these too much. That is the reason why most medical associations and experts recommend do not eat many meals with trans fans, in fact you should avoid to consume more than 1% of trans fats.
It is important you know that these are the unhealthiest type of fat you could eat ever, you can find it in foods cooked with hydrogenated oils, for example fries and other processed foods. Trans fat increase low-density lipoprotein (what we normally named bad cholesterol), and also decrease your high-density lipoprotein (our natural and good cholesterol).
For that reason this types of fat increases the risk for heart disease and stroke. Scientific research proved that animal products have small amounts of trans fats content, but it is really lesser. They also naturally occur in in.
Healthier Options
Now you can make some considerations about what types of fat you should avoid, but it is necessary to warning you that you cannot eliminate fats from your diet because they are a basic complement if you want a healthy diet.
Maybe you are wondering what kinds of fatty meals you could eat to replace trans fats and reduce saturated fats; well, the right answer is monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats.
These types of fat reduce your risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart diseases, strokes, cancer and diabetes.
Some foods or ingredients with monounsaturated fats are: avocado, whole milk products, popcorn, nuts, poultry, whole grain wheat, cereal, oatmeal, sunflower oil, olive oil, sesame oil, corn oil, safflower oil, canola oil and peanut oil.
Polyunsaturated fats (triglycerides) contain omega-3 fats, and omega-6 and foods with this particular fat content are: fatty fish such as tuna and sardines, walnuts, peanut butter, flax, some vegetable oils (listed before), nuts and seeds.
Finally remember that any unsaturated fats should be limited in your diet, at least no more than 35% of calories, chiefly if you want to maintain your weight. Besides, you should consume omega-6 fats and omega-3 fats equally because either one make different functions in your body.
