Introduction

    What comes to mind when people hear the word “fat”? I’ll bet most typical associations with this word are not positive ones. How about “unhealthy foods”, “unhealthy body”, and, “causes heart disease”? Hopefully, this book will help you obtain a larger and more accurate picture of fat, and to learn some new associations; for example “oils prevent heart disease”, “eating fat helps me stick to my diet”, “getting exercise is more important for my health than losing weight”. There are many kinds of fats, good fats and bad fats, and in this book I will teach you how to tell the difference. I’ll also teach you how to avoid the bad fats, and try to convince you to eat as much as you want of the good ones.

    Fat refers to a group of substances, some of which are not healthy, and some of which promote health. Fat has earned a bad name because we tend to eat large amounts of foods such as meat and fast foods, containing truly bad fats that increase the risk of getting heart disease. This situation has led to the widespread belief that in order to be healthy, we must avoid fat in our diets. However, simply avoiding fat has not proven to be an effective way to improve our diets and our health.

    Low fat diets are not as palatable, as satisfying, or as well balanced, as are diets containing moderate amounts of fat. Instead of focusing on decreasing the amount of fat in our diets, we need to focus on replacing unhealthy fats with healthy fats in our everyday menus. The right kinds of fats have many benefits including decreasing the risk of heart disease. (That’s right, decreasing, not increasing the risk of heart disease.) Heart disease is the major killer of men and women in this country. Thus dietary measures that can help protect against heart disease are important for everyone.

    Healthy, unsaturated fats are found in foods that most people really enjoy, such as peanut butter, salad dressing, and avocado. Mayonnaise is another healthy fat, since it consists primarily of oil. If you include healthy fats in your meals, for example eating lots of salad made with an oil based dressing, using olive oil in your cooking, and using real mayonnaise in your tuna salad, your meals will not only be healthier, but will be more satisfying. You will be less likely to crave junk food and dessert later, and because of this, you will end up eating less bad fat. Thus trying to eat more good fat can help you eat less bad fat, and can dramatically change the ratio of good to bad fat that you consume.

    I was brought up by parents who were health food nuts. We read books on nutrition by Adele Davis and other popular health food proponents, and like my parents, I believed everything I read. I decided to go to college at U.C. Berkeley because of their strong Nutrition Department. One of the most important things I learned in college was not to believe everything I read, and how to figure out which claims were based on evidence, and which were not. I learned to decipher the enormous literature of scientific studies on nutrition, how to look at the data and draw conclusions for myself, sometimes not in agreement with the authors of the study. I began to question some of the health food gurus’ claims that my family unconditionally accepted, and because of this my family considered me to be brainwashed by the scientific establishment!

    Over the years, I carried out research on various aspects of fat nutrition and on heart disease. What I came to believe was that my mom had been right to give us lots of avocados, oils, and nuts, and that my dad had been right in eating all the mayonnaise and aged cheeses that he wanted. They ate lots of healthy foods and never worried about the fat content. They enjoyed active, healthy lives well into their 80s. I started to question the advice of the American Heart Association focusing on the fat content of foods, and worried about my friends and relatives who ate fat-free salad dressing. I went to the library to see whether the bulk of scientific studies really supports such practice, and found out that the answer is no. It is untrue to say that all fat is undesirable. There are many kinds of fats, and in the following chapters I'll explain what all the different kinds of fat are, and describe the evidence that they are good or bad for you. Hopefully you will learn to accept fat as a valuable component of your diet.

Links to Excerpt Pages

Contents

Introduction
Chapter one Calories, not fat, make people fat
Chapter two    Fitness is as important as fatness
Chapter three   Heart disease, diabetes, and fat
Chapter four   Eating fat does not cause cancer
Chapter five   Good fat, bad fat
Chapter six   What are saturated and unsaturated fats?
Chapter seven   Oils are good for you
Chapter eight   All about cholesterol
Chapter nine    Watch out for rancid fats
Chapter ten    What about antioxidants?
Chapter eleven   Help with hypoglycemia
Chapter twelve    Achieving good health by integrating fat wisely

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