Fat. What a loaded word.

In our Westernized society we’ve been conditioned to believe that fat, and specifically saturated fat, is bad for you. Go ahead and google anything about heart disease, cooking fat, how much fat to eat, and you’d be hard-pressed to find much other than ‘it causes high cholesterol which leads to heart disease’, ‘cook with hydrogenated vegetable oils’, and “eat as little of it as you can – especially saturated fat’.

Luckily, the world has started to pull it’s head out of the can of Crisco and start to understand that fat is not all bad for you, and that eating it regularly can actually lead you to optimal health.

It all started back in the 1960’s when researcher Ancel Keys formulated the diet-heart-hypothesis, which stated that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat cause cardiovascular disease (CVD) and that unsaturated fats found in vegetable oils are good for human health. In his infamous Seven Countries Study, Keys cherry-picked data that support his hypothesis. That is not how respectable science is to be conducted, my friends.

There were other researchers in the field that questioned Keys and pointed out his flawed studies, but Keys was a very determined and convincing man. These true scientists were silenced in the community by Keys and his supporters by not publishing their studies that proved the diet-heart-hypothesis wrong, and by uninviting them to conferences so they could no longer publicly question Keys about his shoddy research.

The American Heart Association loved an ‘explanation’ as to why so many Americans were dying from CVD, so they started putting out dietary guidelines based on Keys published findings. And the American people started consuming more processed vegetable oils and significantly reducing their intake of saturated fats; the primary macronutrient of human diets since the beginning of time.

Well then, if not dietary cholesterol and saturated fat, what does cause CVD? There is no conclusive evidence to point to any one thing that causes CVD, but there are many factors that researchers believe contribute. Chronic stress, lack of movement, consumption of processed foods (including trans fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils), chronic inflammation and lack of sleep are all believed to have an impact on cholesterol levels, which will impact risk of CVD.

It is important to watch cholesterol levels, so you know where you’re at with your heart health.

Another reason fat has been vilified is because it contains 9 calories per gram, while the other macronutrients carbohydrates and protein only 4 calories per gram. The simple idea of ‘eating fat makes you fat’ due to an old and effortless theory of ‘calories in, calories out’, is, thankfully, fading out of popular acceptance.

We now have a fuller understanding that the nutrient density of calories has a much greater impact on fat loss or gain (commonly referred to as weight loss or weight gain) and overall health, rather than the caloric density of foods.

So you say saturated fat is not bad for me, it’s okay to eat egg yolks and I can eat as many calories as I want?! All but the latter; most of us cannot be eating 6,000 calories on the daily and expect to not gain fat. We need to focus on eating the most nutrient-dense foods available and consuming close the amount of calories that we burn. But, yes, you can eat eggs, bacon, butter and bone marrow, and not gain fat!

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Fuel better, feel better,

Sara