Fat is Good
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Fat, we hear the word and shudder because it’s become a negative term in our society. Often, the message in the media is: Fat’s bad. Fat kills. I’m here to tell you these misunderstood, beautiful round storage cells full of food energy have been made scapegoats to the nth degree. Yes, you’ve got it right. I wish to speak on the behalf of fat.

Here’s an interesting fact. If we had 0% fat in our bodies, we’d be dead. The goal of weight loss is not to completely eliminate fat, it’s to get your body to a healthy fat ‘range.’ You can see from the following chart that ‘healthy’ is a measurable place between underfat and overfat that varies with age and gender.

Body Fat % Ranges for Standard Adults (NIH/WHO BMI guidelines, Gallagher NY Obesity Research Centre)

Females:
Fat percent ranges
Age.................Unhealthy....Healthy......Unhealthy
20-39 years.....0-20...............21-33..........>34
40-59 years.....0-22...............23-34......... >35
60-79 years.....0-23...............24-36..........>37

Males:
Fat percent ranges
Age................Unhealthy.....Healthy......Unhealthy
20-39 years.....0-7.................8-20............>21
40-59 years.....0-10...............11-22..........>23
60-79 years.....0-12...............13-25..........>26

Here’s another fact not widely known. There are two kinds of fat in the body, essential and storage fat. Essential fat is stored in your bone marrow, all of your organs, intestines, muscles, and fat rich tissues of your nervous system including your spinal cord and brain, with women also having essential fat storage in areas such as the breasts. These fats are essential to the proper functioning of your body. Consider that cell walls are largely composed of fats. Just imagine if you didn’t have cell walls.

Storage fat is deposited in your fat cells, also known as adipose tissue. Some of this fat is necessary to provide padding and protection for your internal organs, so you may experience pain from your organs if you lose too much weight. It’s important to realize that being underweight is just as unhealthy as being overweight.

There are a number of body composition methods you can use to determine your fat percentages or body composition health ranges. These methods include skinfold calipers, hydrostatic weighing, and bioelectrical impedance devices. None of these methods are 100% accurate, so it’s really important to view the number you get as a baseline used to determine change, rather than as a number that reflects your self-worth.

Accuracies and inaccuracies aside, a good example of how this fat number can cause personal distress was when a friend of mine, an elite athlete, had her fat percentages measured. The personal trainer told her not to worry, that she was in a good range. Unfortunately, my friend became so alarmed by what she perceived as a high number that she had a crisis and went to see her doctor, who, luckily, helped her develop a new way of perceiving the percentage. This was the reaction of an athlete with good body composition! So please remember you need fat to live. Zero percent is not what you’re looking for in your food or in your body.

Some more fat facts:

• Fat is energy. In times long gone if we didn’t get enough fat we didn’t survive. The same goes today.

• Fat helps food taste good and helps us feel fuller.

• Without adequate fat in the diet we become deficient in the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and E because our body becomes unable to metabolize them.

• A very low fat, high carbohydrate diet can cause our good cholesterol levels to go down, which we don’t want. On the other hand, a high fat diet, especially in saturated fats, can cause our good cholesterol to go down as well as increasing our bad cholesterol levels. Fat balance is key to improving health.

• The dietary recommendation for fat intake is 30% of our total diet. For females 19-49 years that would be about 65 grams of fat, which is 16 teaspoons. Males 19-49 would take in about 90 grams or 22 teaspoons.

• Where is the fat in the foods we eat? One egg contains 5-6 grams of fat. Two tablespoons of Kraft Classic salad dressing contains about 11 grams of fat. One Big Mac has 31 grams of fat.

• The omega 3 and 6 polyunsaturated fats are considered ‘essential,’ meaning if we don’t eat them we’ll become deficient in them. Deficiencies can lead to an increased risk for developing cardiovascular diseases, immune dysfunction, cancer, and diabetes. Generally, we get enough omega 6’s from leafy vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, vegetable oils, and poultry fat. It’s the omega 3’s we’re often deficient in. Sources are: salmon, mackerel, tuna, trout, sardines, herring, bluefish, anchovy, flax seeds and oil, hemp seeds and oil, canola, soybean, and walnut oils, nuts and seeds.

Fat is good! So I urge you to make fat the kind of wonderful friend who can help your food taste great, your stomach feel full, and your health become excellent. That would indeed be a wonderful relationship. However if fat moves in and becomes the kind of house guest that never goes away and who keeps bringing more and more of his ‘stuff’ into your house, well, it’s time to tell fat to get his own house, but he can visit now and then.

For your health and happiness, may the fat balance be with you.

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Photo Credit: Rob Owen-Wahl
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