We believe there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ fats, just foods you can enjoy more often and others you may want to eat less frequently. Food is meant to be enjoyed, and no food should be off-limits. 🍽️
Fats are essential nutrients in your diet and they play a number of crucial roles in your health, including:
Providing energy for everyday functions → Fats contain over twice the energy per gram compared to carbs and proteins.
Aiding vitamin absorption → Fats help with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Including some healthy fats in your diet ensures that these essential vitamins are effectively absorbed and utilized by your body.
Offering essential fats like Omega-3 and Omega-6, which your body can't produce on its own → Omega-3 is crucial for your heart and brain health.
Additionally, they add texture and taste, making eating a pleasurable experience. 🍲
While including fats in your diet is vital, high blood lipid levels over time can lead to unfavorable effects like oxidative stress and inflammation. It's best to limit your intake of fats, particularly lower quality fats, and stay below your unique fat threshold. This helps avoid unhealthy lipid responses after eating, which can increase long-term health risks.
Lipoprotein remodeling, where fat particles in your blood change size, number, or composition, can make them more likely to damage your arteries. Over time, these responses contribute to a higher risk of heart disease.
Other nutrients in foods we eat may influence how our bodies process and respond to fats. Recent research has shown that polyphenols and other antioxidants, such as those found in minimally processed extra virgin olive oil, can protect against the negative impacts of increased blood fat levels after eating. This makes it healthier than more processed olive oils with the same fatty acid composition and food matrix.
We understand that considering all these factors and making the best choices for your health while balancing your desires can be challenging. To help you, we offer insights into how many lower quality fats you've logged over a week compared to our recommended target. Food sources in the lower quality fat category range from bad to average quality, but we've grouped them together for simplicity. We're currently working on providing you with a breakdown of the actual food sources for each category.