Saturated Fats – A Review

Fats are one of the main components in all of the cell membranes throughout your entire body. If you eat enough healthy natural fats, your cellular processes will proceed normally. On the other hand, if you eat man-made, heavily processed, chemically altered fats (damaged fats) that are found in most processed foods, your cellular function will be impaired as these damaged fats become part of your cell membranes, the body will have to work harder to operate correctly, and degenerative diseases can develop. SATURATED FATS: These fats are solid at room temperature. When you take in more calories than your body needs, saturated fats raise cholesterol and increase risk for heart attacks. Large amounts of saturated fats are found in butter, meats and high-fat dairy products. Polyunsaturated Fats Polyunsaturated fats are consumed way too much by most Americans. There should be an equal balance between the two essential fatty acids. Omega six fatty acids are found in most polyunsaturated products such as vegetable oils. These are usually liquid at room temperature. The other essential fatty acid is omega 3 fatty acids which come mostly from monounsaturated fats. Saturated fats—which you'll find in steak, ice cream, and butter—have been studied for decades, while trans fats—present in doughnuts, fries and margarine—have been under scrutiny for only the last 10 years. Both have been proven to increase low-density lipoprotein, your "bad cholesterol" indicator. LDL transports cholesterol—a waxy substance that helps rebuild cell membranes and create hormones, among other things—from the liver to the rest of the body, where it can accumulate in arteries and cause heart disease. These fats are usually solid or almost solid at room temperature. Examples of saturated fats are animal fats and some vegetable oils like coconut. These are considered the unhealthy fats. Of the two types of cholesterol in the human body, saturated fats make the body produce more LDL cholesterol (which is considered the 'bad' cholesterol, as HDL is the 'good' cholesterol). When you look at the effect of saturated fat on health, you must also look at the intake of carbohydrates. Many studies have shown that if you replace carbs with fat, your triglycerides levels go down and your good cholesterol goes up. And your bad (LDL) cholesterol particles get bigger, which means they're less harmful. Human studies, as well as animal, both demonstrated that when strict diets of polyunsaturated seed oils are largely consumed such as sunflower, corn, safflower, and soybean, they act like toxic hormone, immune suppressing drugs inside the body. All unsaturated oils no matter how organically produced, cold-pressed, unprocessed, bottled in glass, or kept away from heat and light are health damaging fats. The substitute for saturated fats We discussed what are the high cholesterol foods, which are the products that contain the higher concentration of dietary cholesterol, but which are really the substitutes for saturated fats? First, you may aim for foods that are good sources of complex carbohydrates (i.e. fiber and starch) like pasta, cereals, rice, beans and dried peas. Barley bran, apples, oranges and some dried beans could also help in reducing total blood cholesterol levels.