In the last few decades the general opinion about dietary fats has been very negative. Food industry spends billions annually to make our food products low fat. As a result we now have light products, dangerous fat substitutes such as Olestra (Made by Proctor & Gamble, often to be found in potato chips), low fat diet books and diet pills making sure our body doesn’t absorb the essential fatty acids.

Low fat diets aren't the solution

With all these efforts to decrease the fat percentage in our overall diet, we haven’t gotten any healthier. In America about 50% of the population is overweight and about 20% is obese. This is an increase of a 100% in the past 40 years! Scientific research concluded that our low fat way of living doesn’t even result in lower cancer and heart disease rates. Those were some of the main reasons why low fat diets were invented in the first place. These statistics obviously tell us something important about our low fat diets: dietary fat isn’t as bad as we think.

Different kinds of fat

It’s important to remember that there are many different kinds of fat. Some fats should be used in moderation (saturated fats), other are very beneficial for your health and should be consumed more liberally (unsaturated fats) while trans fats are extremely bad for your health and should be avoided at all cost.

Fat doesn’t make you gain weight

The following is a basic diet and weight principle that you should remember:

When increasing the overall fat percentage in a diet, you will not gain weight! Or when refreased: when the total calorie amount of your diet stays the same, a reasonable increase of fat in your diet will not necessarily lead to weight gain. This principle sounds very unnatural, but it's true. Fat forms an essential energy source for the body and plays an important role in weight management. (You can read more about basic diet principles in another blog entry where I talk about the best diet ever).

Many professional athletes (and bodybuilders) have body fat percentages under 8%. They achieve such low percentages by exercising a lot in combination with a strict supervised diet. In their diet a certain calorie percentage must come from dietary fats. You think this doesn't make any sense? "Doesnt eating more dietary fats make you gain fat?" No! When dietary fats are consumed our body receives a signal that new energy from fat is still up and coming, so the body can thus continue to use it's fat storages as an energy source. The other way around, when fat consumption would be completely stopped, our body will also stop using fat as an energy source. The body will then look for another another energy source instead (such as carbohydrates, proteins and in the worst case our body would break down muscle tissue). That's why it is important to balance your diet by including carbohydrates, proteins AND dietary fats in all your meals.

Concluding this article. It's important to remember that fat should not be avoided as it does not necessarily make you gain weight. What matters is the total amount of calories consumed and burned  at the end of each day. It's also important to consider the different kinds of dietary fat, because not all fats are created equal and each one has a different effect on your body. In another post I talk about the different kinds of dietary fat.

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