Saturated fat and heart disease
You probably already knew that too many saturated fats increase your risk of heart disease. Now we're also finding out that eating just one meal high in saturated fat can actually impair the ability of your "good" HDL cholesterol to ward of blood vessel inflammation. And, to add insult to injury, saturated fats also hinder your blood vessels from reacting properly to stress.
The ability of your HDL (high-density lipoproteins) cholesterol to prevent inflammation in your blood vessels in imperative when it comes to warding off vascular disease. HDL actually works by carrying the bad form of cholesterol out of your arteries and back to your liver, where they're processed and excreted. So the higher your level of this "good" cholesterol, the lower your risk is for heart disease.
Instead, according to a recent study what you want is polyunsaturated fat, which doesn't mess with your heart's health.
In this study (performed by scientists at the Heart Research Institute in Sydney, Australia), researchers tested how consuming single high-fat meals of different fat compositions affected the ability of HDL cholesterol to stop inflammation in large and small blood vessels.
To get the results, 14 adults ate a meal with 75 percent polyunsaturated fat on one occasion, and on a different occasion, ate another meal with 89.6 percent saturated fat.
The researchers noticed that HDL cholesterol was less effective at preventing inflammation after the saturated fat meal than it was after the polyunsaturated meal. And, in fact, eating polyunsaturated fats actually enhanced HDL's ability to prevent inflammation.
So now you probably want to know which foods to eat for polyunsaturated fats, and which foods have all those saturated fats that you want to avoid.
Polyunsaturated fats are almost always plant-based, and the highest levels are usually found in corn, nuts, safflower, soybean, and sunflower oils. Saturated fats, on the other hand, are found mostly in animal products.
But don't let the healthier nature of polyunsaturated fats trick you into thinking they won't stick to your thighs and belly. These fats contain the same number of calories as saturated fat -- they just don't clog your arteries quite so much.
However, like always, there were some important facts the study didn't go into.
First of all, you still need some saturated fats -- the recommended amount is about 10 percent of your total calories (between 20 and 30 g per day). Saturated fats are important for helping maintain the structural integrity and functioning of every cell in your body and play an important role in the synthesis of hormones. You just don't want to go overboard.
By the same token, not all polyunsaturated fats are good for you. The colorless, heat processed vegetable oils mostly from corn, soy and safflower you find on the shelves of supermarkets come with a host of problems. The main one is that they promote oxidation in your body, if eaten in excess.
Stick with cold-processed, expeller-pressed vegetable oils and olive oils. Also avoid the cheaper, colorless, heat-processed junk oils that can absolutely wreck you body.
