Fats with Benefits
For years, the mainstream thinking about fat sounded like a line that could
appear in a nursery rhyme—Don’t want to be fat? Better not eat fat. But that
statement is actually false on two levels. You need fat. As one of the three
macronutrients, it’s a pillar of well-balanced nutrition. Your brain, for instance,
is composed of 60 percent fat (we are really “fat heads”), so you require the
dietary kind to support memory and clear thinking, and your body uses fat as
energy throughout the day.
The trick is to get fat from the right sources, because dietary fats come in
several forms. The ones you really want are found in the foods listed above
because they’re unsaturated fats.
Saturated fats are solid at room temperature (think butter), and they’ve been
associated with heart disease. (Red meat contains saturated fat but this can be a
tricky area, because grass-fed cattle deliver some healthy fat, but red meat also
contains a compound called L-carnitine, which may lead to clogged arteries.)
Small amounts of saturated fat appear to be okay. I don’t want you to obsess
about counting nutrients, but the recommendation is no more than 7 percent of
your total diet should come from saturated fats—that’s 14 grams on a 2,000-
calorie day.