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Good Fats vs. Bad Fats
Learn which fats are best for
your health
By Jamie Lober, Staff Writer
Everyone should take the time to
educate themselves about good fats
and bad fats. Believe it or not, all fats
are not the same.
“In your good fat camp, there are
monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats,” said Dr. Sheila Melander,
acute care nurse practitioner at UK
Healthcare. Monounsaturated fats
include olive, canola, peanut and
sesame oils and avocados, olives
and nuts. Polyunsaturated fats are
mostly plant based, such as soybean,
corn and sunflower oils, walnuts,
flaxseed and pumpkin seed. They are
also found in fatty fish such as tuna,
salmon, mackerel, herring, trout and
sardines. Soy milk and tofu are also
polyunsaturated and are considered
good fats as well.
Bad fats include saturated fats and
transfats.
“Saturated fats are your high-fat
cuts of meat like beef, ham, pork
and chicken that has the skin on it,”
Melander said. “Transfats are in commercially based items like pastries,
cookies, donuts, muffins, pizza dough
and even microwave popcorn.”
Margarine and vegetable shortenings are usually high in transfats, as
are fried foods such as chicken nuggets, breaded fish and French fries.
The key is to have a balance. “We
would like good fats to be 20 to 35
percent of our daily calories and bad
fats to be no more than 10 percent
of our diet,” said Melander. If you
have a family history of cardiovascular disease, you may want
to limit your bad fats even
further.
“Look at things that
are high in polyunsaturated fat,” Melander
said. “Limit your
intake of red meat.
Switch from full-fat
milk to a lower-fat version, and eat
omega-3 fats that are found in fish
and walnut and flaxseed oils.” Omega3s prevent and reduce symptoms of
depression, protect against memory
loss and dementia and reduce the risk
of heart disease, stroke and cancer.
They can even ease arthritis and joint
pain and decrease inflammatory conditions.
The take-home message is that
everyone can make better choices.
“When you swap those bad fats
out with good choices, it lowers your
cholesterol and you are reducing your
risk for disease,” said Melander.
When cooking, opt for
baking, broiling or
grilling instead
of frying and
avoid breaded
&
45
meat and deep-fried vegetables.
“Use a liquid vegetable oil like olive
or canola oil instead of shortening or
cooking with butter,” said Melander.
Make it your goal to become a
healthier person. “The more saturated they are, the more the fats will
up your blood cholesterol,” said
Melander. “Transfats are the worst
because they not only raise LDL but
also lower HDL or good cholesterol.”
When you know the facts, it is simple
to make small modifications to your
diet that can have a measurable
impact on your health.
Believe it or not, all fats
are not the same.
FOOD continued from Page 35
and was processed into value-enhanced food products such as veggie
chips, jams and smoothie bases, it could then be wholesaled back to
the same supermarket or other retailers for $2 a pound. These products could then be retailed at double the price, generating more than
$90,000 in monthly gross revenue, which would be enough to support
several employees at a family wage.
The preliminary results suggest the potential production inputs
nationally would be about 1.1 billion pounds annually. The researchers believe this is a model to address global food security. It makes better use of the food already produced and could also help relieve chronic hunger. It also addresses the cost barriers that prevent these important sources of healthy nutrients from reaching lower-income people
in the United States. The researchers believe the model, dubbed the
Food System-Sensitive Methodology (FSSM), can also be applied to
meats, grains and dairy. The model was executed by researchers from
Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, Cabrini College
as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Recovery
Challenge. The results were published in the journal Food and
Nutrition Sciences.