Fats and oils

So I have long loved and used butter. It tastes so much better than margarine or vegetable oils but I always felt guilty. You know the feeling. I tried to be good and use smart balance or some other type of spread. I tried to cook with canola oil or the like but I never liked the outcome. So I resigned myself to just being fat and unhealthy if that is what it took to be able to cook with butter.

My other miss guided thought was if you don't want to get fat then you shouldn't eat fat. Makes sense to me. I figured why give my body something to deposit directly to hips. I'm gonna make it work to turn foods into fat to then deposit on my hips. So I ate lean meats. Cut any trace of fat off of steaks. I would pick apart my bacon so I only ate the meat and there was always a plate of fat pieces left. Well.... I couldn't have been more wrong.

This is an expert from an article I recently read. To read the whole thing click here.

The vilification of fats go back to the early 1950's, when Dr. Ancel Keys published an influential paper comparing fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries.
Americans, who ate the most fat had the highest heart disease mortality rate, while the Japanese, who ate the least amount of fat had the fewest heart disease deaths.
However, this was a perfect case of statistical cherry-picking to support a position.
Statistics were actually available for 22 countries, and when all 22 were analyzed and included, the link between fat consumption and heart disease was nonexistent....
Unfortunately, the hypothesis presented by Dr. Keys quickly turned into the dogmatic belief that saturated fats increase your risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Today, it's been well-established that the only really dangerous fat out there is trans fat (margarine, vegetable oils), which initially, and ironically, were touted as the answer to that heart-harming saturated fat.
Despite this, the general belief that fat is bad for you lingers even in the highest echelons of medicine.
The truth is that your body requires saturated fats, and the 'substantiating evidence' pointing toward saturated fats being harmful is flimsy at best....

Why Your Body Needs Saturated Fat

Saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources (such as meat, dairy, certain oils, and tropical plants like coconut) provide the building blocks for your cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone like substances that are essential to your health. Fats also slows down absorption of your meal so that you feel satiated longer.
In addition, saturated fats are also:

• Carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, and required for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption, and for a host of other biological processes
• Useful antiviral agents (caprylic acid)
• Effective as an anticaries, antiplaque and anti fungal agents (lauric acid)
• Useful to actually lower cholesterol levels (palmitic and stearic acids)
• Modulators of genetic regulation and prevent cancer (butyric acid)

Fats also provide a highly concentrated source of energy in your diet—a source of energy that is far more ideal than carbohydrates, which is why I recommend increasing healthy fat consumption in combination with severely restricting refined carbohydrates (sugars, fructose, and grains).
There is emerging evidence that your diet should be at least half healthy fat, and possibly as high as 70 percent. Part of the reason for this is that there are powerful adverse hormonal changes that typically occur when your body burns non-vegetable carbohydrates like grains and sugars. This does not occur when you consume fibrous vegetables or healthy fats. This likely explains the mountain of scientific evidence showing that calorie restricted diets extend lifespan. Mostly likely it is not a calorie issue per se, as it is the type of calories, specifically non-vegetable carbohydrates.
As a general rule, when you cut down on carbs, you need to increase your fat consumption. Replacing it with more protein is not a wise choice as it will also have similar problems. And, while this also works in the opposite way; meaning when you cut fat, you need to replace that lost energy source with carbs, this strategy has the unfortunate effect of promoting fat storage and weight gain.

Not All Saturated Fats are the Same…

It's unfortunate, but in today's world of processed food-like products, it's more important than ever to really understand what "real" food is, and not fall for the idea that you can substitute real foods with "new and improved" alternatives. Doing so can have severe health consequences. Trading naturally-occurring saturated fats for trans fats is just one example. Not understanding the inherent nutritional differences between grass-fed, organically-raised meats and that from cattle raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) is another.
They're simply not interchangeable. Neither are organic vegetables and conventionally grown—or worse, genetically modified—varieties…
That said, let's get back to fats.
As I just mentioned, when you cut carbs, you need to replace those calories with healthy fats. Both are sources of energy, but healthy fats are far more ideal than carbs. (In fact, saturated fat is the preferred fuel for your heart.) However, not just any kind of fat will do. The Atkins Diet is one popular example of a low-carb, high-fat diet that has helped many shed unwanted pounds. Unfortunately, Dr. Atkins didn't pay much attention to the QUALITY of the fats, so while his recommendations worked in the short-term, many who tried it ended up experiencing long-term problems.
It's important to understand that not all saturated fats are the same. There are subtle differences that have profound health implications, and if you avoid eating all saturated fats, your health will likely suffer as a result.

So, What is "Healthy Fat," and How Much Do You Need?

Sources of healthy fats include:

Olives and Olive oil	Coconuts and coconut oil	Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk
Raw Nuts, such as, almonds or pecans	Organic pastured egg yolks	Avocados
Grass fed meats	Palm oil	Unheated organic nut oils

Another healthful fat you want to be mindful of is animal-based omega-3. Deficiency in this essential fat can cause or contribute to very serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. For more information about omega-3's and the best sources of this fat, please review this previous article.
Personally, my diet consists of close to 70 percent fat. I recently published a discussion between Paul Jaminet, PhD., author of the book, Perfect Health Diet, and Dr. Ron Rosedale, an expert on insulin and leptin metabolism, which compares their individual low-carb, high-fat diet recommendations. While there is mild controversy whether or not you can safely include starches like rice and potatoes in your diet, both do recommend consuming somewhere between 50-70 percent fat.
This is in stark contrast to conventional dietary guidelines issued by the U.S. government, which advises you to consume less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fats!

Saturated Fat Does Belong in a Healthy Diet

Such a low recommendation is illogical when you consider the evidence available today, which supports saturated fat as a necessary part of a heart healthy diet. For example, as discussed in a recent article by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, a number of indigenous tribes around the world are living proof that a high-saturated fat diet equates to low mortality from heart disease.
These include:

Tribe	Primary Diet	Percentage Saturated Fat
Maasai tribe in Kenya/Tanzania	Meat, milk, cattle blood	66 percent
Inuit Eskimos in the Arctic	Whale meat and blubber	75 percent
Rendille tribe in NE Kenya	Camel milk, meat, blood	63 percent
Tokealu, atoll islands in New Zealand territory	Fish and coconuts	60 percent

And then there's human breast milk, which contains 54 percent saturated fat. Since breast milk is the most perfect diet in existence for developing infants, the presence of high amounts of saturated fat cannot easily be construed as a "mistake."

So what do we do now? We eat fat and love it! I took me a bit to work up to putting a whole piece of bacon in my mouth without picking the fat off but I do and I love it. In fact I crave the fat now. My brain is wanting more and more! Which makes sense since that is what brains feed on. We cook our meat in Ghee (clarified butter that can be used with dairy allergies), even hamburger meat and we don't get lean meat anymore. I use flax oil at almost every meal especially with the babies and we eat a lot of avocados! We still have room for improvement but we have definitely upped our fat intake recently. BTW, since we have upped our fat intake and gotten rid of grains and most starches and legumes I have lost over 10 pounds. Obviously my previous theory was flawed. :-)