Fat is the evil monster that makes you unhealthy and packs on the pounds — or so modern thought would have you believe. For the last 20 plus years, dietary fat has been cast in the role of a villain, and low fat diets held out as the hero.  So has the advent of low fat diets changed the eating habits and the health of the American people?

Yes.

Now we are fatter than ever.  The rate of overweight and obesity has actually DOUBLED over the years since low fat became the mantra.  Pretty good evidence that fat has been miscast as the bad guy.

Don’t get me wrong — there are fats that are, indeed, bad for you.  They are also the most calorie-dense of all foods, so too much can certainly bring your weight loss to a screeching halt.

However, fat is slow to digest, which makes it low-glycemic.  It prevents the big sugar dump (see last post) and also keeps hunger at bay.

Besides those noticeable things, fat does several other things on the cellular level.  Your hormones are made primarily from fat, and hormones are the biochemicals that run your body functions.  The walls of nerve cells are made of fat, which enable the nerves to communicate, the heart to beat, and muscles to contract.  The fat in cell walls regulates the flow of nutrients into the cell.  Even your brain is made up of mostly fat tissue.  (Not calling you a fat-head — just stating the facts!)

There are many other functions of fat in the body.  However, we all are mostly concerned with the extra stuff packed in storage.  We want to get rid of it!

A low fat or non fat diet isn’t the answer.  Choosing the right fats and eating them at the right level is what will help us clear out the storage units around our middles.

We’ll be looking more at fats in this series which I like to call “FATS — the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Eating to live and living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown