Fat is easily the most controversial macronutrient. It is both the sworn enemy of the entire diet / fitness industry and a necessary component of your overall health and wellness. Let’s take a moment to demystify fat and learn how it can help you achieve your goals.
In this article…
- What Is Dietary Fat?
- What Is Saturated Fat?
- What Is Unsaturated Fat?
- What Is Trans Fat?
- What Is Body Fat?
- How Much Fat Should I Consume?
- Fat: The Takeaway
First, I want to distinguish between dietary fat and body fat.
Dietary fat is fat, or lipids, that come from food. It comes in several varieties (which we’ll get into later) and can be found most commonly in meat, dairy, nuts, avocados, olives, coconuts, and more.
Body fat is fat kept in your body as adipose tissue. It is a form of stored energy from unused calories.
It is important to understand that eating dietary fat does not cause you to gain weight. It is also important to understand that too much dietary fat can cause you to gain weight.
Wait, what?
Let me explain.
If you’ve read my articles on protein and carbohydrates, the other macronutrients, you probably already know that they contain less than half the calories of dietary fat.
There are 9 calories per gram of dietary fat. This is compared to 4 calories per gram of protein or carbs. This means that 10 grams of dietary fat has 90 calories, while 10 grams of protein or carbs has only 40 calories.
You don’t have to be a mathmagician to see how quickly dietary fat adds up. This means foods that are high in dietary fat are consequently high in calories. Eat more calories than you burn in a day and the remaining calories get stored as body fat for later, thus increasing your waistline or bingo wings.
This doesn’t mean we should call the Avengers and have them help us fight a war against dietary fat. In fact, you need dietary fat for proper hormone levels, blood sugar control, inflammation resistance, metabolizing certain vitamins, and even reproductive health.
What Is Dietary Fat?
“Fat” is a broad term for various lipids, chemical compounds your body uses for many different functions. It is a waxy substance that doesn’t dissolve in water. Cholesterol is one example, a lipid in our blood that helps digest food, transport vitamins, and create hormones.
Lipids are in every cell of your body and are essential for your health. That being said, some varieties are better for you than others. They also come in several forms, depending on their chemical composition.
For example, the delicious marbling on a steak, a stick of butter, and a bottle of olive oil are all forms of dietary fat. They are all 9 calories per gram and they all taste delicious. So what’s the difference between them?
Dietary fats are composed of fatty acids consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. These chemical combinations form saturated fat, unsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fat.
What is Saturated Fat?
Saturated fat is a compound of fatty acids with a single bond between the carbon atoms and many hydrogen atoms. This occurs naturally in meat, whole milk, butter, and eggs.
Okay, nerd, what does that mean for me? Well, when processed, saturated fats increase levels of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol. Non-science dorks just call it ‘bad’ cholesterol. It’s the kind that builds up in your system and leads to heart disease.
As such, the scientific community largely agrees that saturated fats aren’t good for you. Like most things in food, consuming saturated fats in moderation shouldn’t have many adverse effects, but gorging yourself on their fatty deliciousness is a recipe for clogged arteries and other heart problems.
What is Unsaturated Fat?
Unsaturated fat contains one (monounsaturated) or several (polyunsaturated) double bonds between carbon atoms. Because of this, they tend to be chemically unstable and thus have a shorter shelf life than their saturated cousins. Examples of unsaturated fats include:
Monounsaturated Fat Sources: canola oil, almonds, cashews, pecans, olives, avocados, safflower oil, sesame seeds.
Polyunsaturated Fat Sources: fish, flax, sunflower seeds, soybeans, walnuts, and corn.
Unsaturated fats raise your levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or ‘good’ cholesterol. These are healthy fats to consume, with the caveat that they are still high in calories, so you should monitor your intake accordingly. In fact, they basically have the opposite effect of saturated and trans fats in that they can decrease your chance of cardiovascular disease.
But don’t think you can game the system by eating both types of fat at the same time and have them cancel each other out.
It doesn’t quite work that way.
Though adding more unsaturated fats into your diet will slowly reverse some of the adverse effects of saturated and trans fats.
What Are Trans Fats?
Trans fats are saturated fats that have undergone hydrogenation, a process where food scientists take a bazooka filled with hydrogen and blast it into an otherwise healthy fat. They do this to stabilize the product for storage, making it cheap for food corporations to maintain.
Once scientists discovered a correlation between trans fats and heart disease, many countries (including the United States in 2015) banned them entirely. Unfortunately, trans fats still exist in some small capacity. Legally speaking, manufacturers don’t have to disclose trans fat on the nutrition label of your food if it contains less than half a gram per serving.
They abuse this system by increasing the number of servings in a container, hiding the true contents from you and making a quick buck while they’re at it. If you look at the back of a bag of chips and it says something like ’28 servings per container’ but you know damn well you’re eating that whole thing, chances are they know that too. By splitting up the servings that may times, they can effectively lie about what is actually in the bag.
So how do we avoid this tomfoolery?
Look for the word ‘hydrogenated’ on your nutrition labels and consider an alternative product if you see it. If you’re out at a restaurant and don’t have a nutrition label to look at, anything fried probably also has trans fats in it. That means French fries, fried chicken, tater tots, jalapeño poppers, onion rings, etc.
What is Body Fat?
Body fat, or adipose tissue, is the storage form of energy for our bodies. It is composed of the same waxy substance as dietary fat, but by the time it forms on your body it has undergone an entire chemical recomposition.
Many of us detest the sight of body fat, but it serves many important functions. It helps insulate us from the elements, it stores vitamins, and even protects our internal organs from external forces by distributing the force from an impact over a larger area kind of like a bulletproof vest. Except humans are not bulletproof. Please don’t test that analogy.
Body fat is created from unused energy, not necessarily from sources of dietary fat. When you consume more calories than your body needs to perform its functions for the day, it saves the excess calories as body fat for later. Maybe tomorrow you’ll need to run from a bear or something. Your body doesn’t know, so it keeps those calories around just in case.
In today’s world, most of us don’t regularly run from bears, so it’s easy to consume more energy than we need. Mix that with the high-palatability of calorie-dense foods like chips, fries, buttered popcorn, or fried chicken and it becomes quite obvious why over 100 million Americans are obese.
“But in your carbohydrate article, you said carbs are the body’s primary source of energy!”
Yes, that’s true.
“So why are you telling me that body fat is stored energy?”
Because when our body runs out of carbs to use for energy, it breaks down stored fat to convert it back into something we can use now. This process is called lipolysis. That’s why it was storing it in the first place, to use in caloric emergencies!
“Ohhh, I got it now. Thanks Coach Winter, you’re so smart and handsome!”
Oh c’mon now, stop…
How Much Dietary Fat Should I Consume?
Roughly 20% – 35% of your daily caloric intake should come from healthy fats. Less than 10% of your daily caloric intake should come from saturated fats if possible, but most or all of your intake should be unsaturated fats. Avoid trans fats entirely.
This means if you’re eating 2,000 calories a day, 400 – 700 of those calories should come from healthy fats. At 9 calories per gram, you’re looking at 45 – 78 grams of dietary fat a day.
Fat: The Takeaway
Dietary fat does not make you fat, but it can. Eat it in moderation, and stick to unsaturated fats whenever possible. Remember 1 gram of fat is more than double the calories of protein or carbs.
