Ron’s Wanderings

What’s All This About Good Fats - Bad Fats?

One area that is often confusing for people working on getting their nutrition and weight loss goals in place is the difference between good fats and bad fats.

One reason for this confusion is that most of what you read about fats doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. So often you’ll read one article that says one thing about it, and then read another one that completely contradicts the first one. Plus, I know for myself, when I’m doing research for these articles, I find that so much of the information is written for a medical professional. The terminology is often way over my head.

For example, I looked up the word “triglycerides” in an online medical dictionary and here’s what I “learned:”

Triglycerides are a naturally occurring ester of three fatty acids and glycerol that is the chief constituent of fats and oils.

Well, excuse me if I don’t know what an “ester” is or a “glycerol.” So I looked those words up too:

An ester is any class of organic compounds corresponding to the inorganic salts and formed from an organic acid and an alcohol.

Oh yeah, — and then there’s this:

Glycerol is a syrupy, sweet, colorless or yellowish liquid, C3H8O3, obtained from fats and oils as a byproduct of saponification and used as a solvent, antifreeze, a plasticizer, and a sweetener and in the manufacture of dynamite, cosmetics, liquid soaps, inks, and lubricants.

How’re you doing? Are you getting all of this? Oh, maybe you’d like me to look up “saponification” too? I’d do that for you, except I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

So, I came up with my own definition for “triglycerides”:

That’s a little better, don’t you think?

I know — you’re still thinking this is all kind of dull — but there is a point to all this — which you’re going to have to hold on for a while longer before I get to it.

First, there’s an interesting thing about triglycerides. (Remember, they are the main form of fat in your body and in your food.) Your body doesn’t store triglycerides only from the fat in your food. Your body can also manufacture them on its own from any excess calories you get from other protein sources.

That explains why if you eat too much pasta you’ll gain weight.

Triglycerides are the chief fat in our bodies (95%) but not the only fat. There are two other fats hanging out in you. One of them is “phospholipids” and the other is “sterols.” Phospholipids, are found in cell membranes and are essential to your body’s ability to manufacture triglycerides —- but your diet has nothing to do with these fats, so we have no reason to dwell on them here.

(Whew! Sure glad about that, huh?)

The other one, however, the sterols, is important. The best known one of these is cholesterol (see the “sterol” on the end of that word?). You know about that one, right? Yep, you got it. This is the fat that attaches itself to protein molecules and then takes a ride through your blood vessels.

I know you have already heard that there are two kinds of cholesterol — “bad” cholesterol (aka LDL, which stands for “low-density lipoprotein”) and the other guy, the “good” cholesterol (aka HDL, or “high-density lipoprotein”).

If you get too much of that “bad” (LDL) stuff, it can lead to a build up of plaque in your arteries and actually can make you pretty darn sick, if it doesn’t kill you.

Thats where the good stuff, the HDL gets involved and if you get enough of that in you it will fight back and carry a bunch of that LDL stuff off to your liver where it can be processed properly and get “excreted” from your body.

Now, there’s a lot more to talk about on this topic, but that’s enough for today. Today was the ground-breaker — the information you need to know in order to have a better understanding of what’s to come in the next few days.

Be sure to come back here tomorrow when we’ll start to talk about what you can do to avoid clogging up your arteries and learning to live a good nutrition and weight loss lifestyle.

Until then, remember to follow a good-fat — good-carb diet and stay with your regular exercise.

Here is some information about the nutritional supplements I add to my nutrition and weight loss program.

Have a great day. I’ll be back tomorrow with some more nutrition and weight loss thoughts for you.

And give the South Beach Diet a try. That’s what I follow. Here’s where to go to learn more:

Shanti,

Ron
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Nutrition and Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.