Good Fats - What Are Healthy Fats?

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Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Article Date: 24 Jul 2008 - 6:00 PDT

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Those who say all fats are bad for you are, of course, dangerously incorrect. As it turns out, plant-based fats are powerful cancer fighters, and even saturated fats from plant sources are now being shown to offer extraordinary health benefits.

If you want to prevent cancer, or you're currently battling colon cancer, prostate cancer or breast cancer, it is essential to get plant-based fats into your diet on a daily basis. What kind of plant-based fats are we talking about? What are the healthy fats?

Canola oil is what I consider a neutral fat, meaning it's not necessarily a bad fat, but neither is it considered one of the healthier fats. The healthy fats include extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed oil, and fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, avocados, and coconuts. These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Failure to include these fats in a meal will result in many of the nutrients consumed during the meal not being absorbed by the body. That's because many nutrients are fat-soluble nutrients. Beta carotene, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E are three such nutrients that require fat in order to be absorbed and used by the human body, but there are many other nutrients that also need fats for human metabolism.

Incidentally, these oils do much more than just fight cancer, they also improve your cardiovascular health and fight weight gain and obesity. The benefits list is a long one.

A fascinating new study published shows that dietary fat is necessary for the absorption of nutrients from fruits and vegetables. In the study, people who consumed salads with fat-free salad dressing absorbed far less of the helpful phytonutrients and vitamins from spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots than those who consumed their salads with a salad dressing containing fat.

This is interesting research, but not necessarily all that surprising. We've known for a long time that healthy fats are a critical part of a healthy diet, and that avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease. The key is in choosing the right kind of fats for your diet and making sure you don't overdo the fats, because fats have a very high caloric density and can add far more calories to your meal than you might expect.

The fact is we all need fats. Fats helps nutrient absorption, nerve transmission, maintaining cell membrane integrity etc. However, when consumed in excess amount, fats contribute to weight gain, heart disease and certain types of cancer. Fats are not created equal. Some fats promote our health positively while other increases our risks of heart disease. The key is to replace bad fats with good fats in our diet.

In other words, if you take super food supplements without fat, you're not getting the same benefit as taking the same supplements with a little bit of fat

The total amount of fat you eat, whether high or low isn't really linked with disease. What really matters is the type of fat you eat.

Written By:
Dr Syed Muneeb Younus
muneebkazi@gmail.com
Copyright: Medical News Today
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