Fat has wrongly been vilified ever sense the 20th century. A man named Ancel Keys was responsible for a big part of it He did research that showed saturated fat causes heart disease. The problem is that he used vegetable oil, which is mainly polyunsaturated fat. We know today that these oils do cause heart disease for a variety of reasons, but Keys pointed to the tiny amount of saturated fat in those oils, and blamed that. This was unpronounced to the public. It’s unfortunate that this research was the basis of how we made fat the enemy for so long. Researches had discredited him at the time, but he came out with another study, called the 7 countries study. This examined 7 countries that ate low saturated fat, and also had low heart disease. He then concluded that saturated fat causes heart disease. The problem is that he ignored the countries that ate high amount of saturated fats, bust also had no heart disease.

Different types of fat

There are two primary types of fat: saturated, and unsaturated. We then can further breakdown unsaturated fat into monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fat. Some of the benefits of healthy fat include building our cell membranes, and hormones. Also, insulating and protecting our nerves. It can also provide structure to the brain. This refers to the amount of double bonds the fats have. Saturated fat has all single bonds, but unsaturated fat has 1, or more double bonds. The double bonds are made of hydrogen, and carbon. when The bonds are doubled, this leaves a place for oxygen to come in the fat, and make it oxidized. This also makes the fat unstable, or rancid, if it’s handled improperly.

What is a healthy fat?

A healthy fat is any fat that has been created by nature. This can be in whole food form, like coconut, avocado, olives, beef, and fish. You can also can have the corresponding oils that go along with these, like coconut oil, avocado oil, and butter. An unhealthy fat would be considered artificial, or man made. This would contain mainly vegetable oil, and trans fat. Vegetable oil is really a misnomer, it’s really seed oils. They are corn, canola, cottonseed, safflower, soybean, and sunflower. These oils are highly processed in a over 40 step process. As apposed to olive oil where all you have to do is crush olives. These seed oils have to be bleached, deodorized, and processed with hexane, which is explosive. They have to processed with very high temperature because it’s very hard to get oil out of those six items. The problem with that is that these oils are mainly polyunsaturated fat which is very heat sensitive, so the oils are rancid already. The last problem I will mention is that that they are extremely high in omega 6 fatty acids, which is a type of polyunsaturated fat. The other PUFA is omega 3. These need to be in balance at a 1-1 to a 1-4 omega 3 to 6, but because of these oils most people are at a 1-20, or more. This is causing a ton of inflammation because omega 6 is the inflammatory of the two.