Ron’s Wanderings

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

Ahh, back again, with some more good thoughts to help you with your nutrition and weight loss goals.

You will remember that when we left off yesterday we were discussing the two types of cholesterol — the “bad” cholesterol — or LDL — and the “good” cholesterol — or HDL. If you have too much LDL in your system you could be clogging up your arteries — and that can get very serious — not only could you get real sick, you could also die from this.

However, if you get enough of the good stuff — the HDL — that good cholesterol will fight off the LDL and help your body to get rid of it.

Now, just to help you avoid some confusion — food itself does not contain either HDL or LDL. (I know, most people think otherwise.)

Food contains a variety of forms of triglycerides.

Remember from yesterday — our definition of triglycerides …

* Some of these triglycerides are good for you because they will lower LDL.
* Some of these triglycerides are maybe good — and maybe NOT good for you because they lower BOTH LDL and HDL.
* The rest of these triglycerides are absolutely, without a doubt, really, really bad for you.

Let’s start with the good fats:

Monounsaturated fats. Found in olive oil (73 percent), grapeseed oil (60 percent), hazelnuts (50 per cent), almonds (35 per cent), Brazil nuts (26 per cent), cashews (28 per cent), avocado (12 per cent), sesame seeds (20 per cent), and pumpkin seeds (16 per cent), these fats actually lower LDL cholesterol while leaving your HDL at the same level.

You have undoubtedly heard about the fact that people who live in Mediterranean countries have very low levels of heart disease. The reason — they have a high concentration of olive oil in their diets.

And, there is also some evidence that monounsaturated fat is high in Vitamin E which may help to protect your body against some cancers like breast cancer and colon cancer. The school is still out on that — so stay tuned.

The fact that you should take home with you is that you should cook with either olive oil or grapefruit oil. You should eat olives, nuts, avocado and pumpkin seeds. And go find yourself some good Mediterranean recipes.

Here’s a couple of websites I found that can give you plenty of recipes:

http://www.1001medrecipes.com (This one is called Aunt Irene’s 1001 Mediterranean Recipes — how could you not like that one!)

http://www.pasioncondal.com/recipes/recipes.htm (This one is mostly Spanish recipes)

http://www.gourmet.gr/mediterranean-recipes/?gid=1&nodeid=28 (This site seems to lean a little more towards the Greek cuisine.)

Have some fun with style of cooking. If you don’t want to do the actual cooking to start out with, but would just like to see how you like this sort of cuisine, then check your yellow pages and find a good restaurant that offers mediterranean recipes in your area. Either way, think about monounsaturated fats and be sure to include them in your own diets every day.

Tomorrow we’ll get into some of the Omega fatty acids and see what we can learn about them and what effect they have on your nutrition and weight loss program.

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 Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 11:18 am 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.