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Home › Articles › Nutrition and Your Health › Fat Facts

Fat Facts

An Excerpt from The Low-Carb Gourmet: 250 Delicious and Satisfying Recipes

By Karen Barnaby

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All fats found in fresh whole foods are good, healthy and sometimes vital. It is wise to include a full spectrum of fats in your diet, which will work hard to keep you healthy and young looking. This, of course, is not the message we have been getting in the popular media, and because of this we have built up an unhealthy guilt complex and fear of fat.

Bad Fats
Certain fats are indeed bad for us, but luckily it is easy to spot them. Trans fatty acids have been linked to raising "bad" cholesterol (LDL) and lowering "good" cholesterol (HDL); they are also suspected of being behind that "stubborn fat" that won't leave no matter what we do. They are the result of processing oils through hydrogenation. You can spot the presence of trans fats in a product because hydrogenated fats have to be listed in the ingredient panel of food. By adding up all the fats listed in the panel and then subtracting that number from the total listed, you will come up with the amount of trans fats in the product. However, the easiest thing to do is just avoid anything that has any hydrogenated oil in it.

Rancid fat is the other bad fat – fat that has been mutated by oxygen, heat, moisture and light. This fat is full of free radicals and can contribute to all the health and aging problems associated with them. At first you might think that it would be easy to avoid this one. Just reading the word "rancid" tends to make our noses wrinkle in disgust; however, we have been conditioned to accept rancid fats.


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