What are good fats and bad fats?
The science behind this is lacking. Some things we know are true. Some things need more study.
Below is everything I know about fats, for your reference.
It means it will raise your LDL level and lower your HDL level, which will increase the chance of you having a blood clot, which will cause heart problems.
In addition to reversing the effects of the bad fats, some good fats are also essential, which means you need to eat enough of them every day, just like a vitamin.
All fats can be divided into these categories:
Generally, trans fats and saturated fats are solid at room temperature, while monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature.
There seems to be consensus among the scientific community, that all monounsaturated fats are good for you. There are no bad monounsaturated fats.
List of foods with high amounts of monounsaturated fats:
A few notes:
Neither Omega 3 nor Omega 6 are “good” or “bad”. Rather, you need to eat a correct ratio of these two fats to be healthy.
Most polyunsaturated fats are higher in omega 6 than omega 3. This is because of shelf life. Foods that have a longer shelf life, generally have a higher omega 6 ratio. Foods with a higher omega 3 ratio go bad faster.
So you need to compensate by eating foods with higher omega 3 amounts. The exact ratio is unknown but a 1 to 1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 seems to be good.
List of oil rich foods with omega 3 higher than omega 6:
List of oil rich foods with omega 6 signficantly higher than omega 3:
Note that non-fish omega 3 based oils have a low smoke point and are not good for frying.
In oil form, Omega 3 Fats go rancid quickly. So it’s best to consume them in the original form (eat fish and seeds, instead of buying fish oil and seed oil.)
Good trans fats are those that are found in nature. Vaccenic Acid is a well known good trans fatty acid, found it human breast milk.
Butter can have about 3% trans fat. This is good trans fat.
Another good trans fat is Conjugated Linoleic Acid, which is found mostly in the meat and dairy products derived from ruminant animals.
Food processing companies make trans fats with a process called hydrogenation. They do this because it makes the oil last longer. But it is not good for you.
Companies are known to hide their trans fats from the nutrition label by rounding it amount down to 0 grams. The way to tell if there are any trans fats is by checking for the words “hydrogenated oil” or “partially hydrogenated oil” in the ingredients listing.
The primary location you would find bad trans fats is in margarine, vegetable shortening, and any foods made with these products.
A well known bad trans fat is called Elaidic acid.
This is the most controversial of all fats.
Unfortunatly, most foods that have Saturated Fat are high in the bad kind of Saturated Fat, Palmitic acid. That is why, generally people avoid all foods with high saturated fat.
However there are good saturated fats too.
The following are known to be good saturated fats
Make sure not to confuse Palm Oil with Palm Kernel Oil. These are different.
Palm Oil has a lot of the bad kind of saturated fat, Palmitic acid, infact the acid was named after the Palm.