Real Food Experience – Week 5: Healthy Oils and Fats

This week we are learning and talking about healthy oils and fats.  Many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s are afraid of fat.  We were taught that all fat was bad and we were trained that low-fat or no-fat was the way to eat.  We ate margarine, low-fat yogurt, and low-fat cheese.  Here’s the problem.  The food industry decided that they wanted us to enjoy the flavor of low-fat foods. Their solution?  Let’s load that stuff with lots of sugar and salt.  Suddenly, they had foods that tasted great and we bought plenty of it.  However, once you realize that sugar turns to fat, you can start to see the problem.  We all got fat eating low-fat foods. Naturally low in fat is a good way to go.  There is not anything wrong with eating lots and lots of vegetables.  I’m not going to get fat eating green beans and neither will you.

A healthy diet actually should include some fat though.  Our brain, heart, and cells need fat to function properly.  The CDC recommends that you keep your fat at 20% – 35% of your total calories.  Synthetic sources of trans fatty acids should be limited and total trans fatty acids should be kept as low as possible.

Some fats and oils are healthier than others.  Remember to limit them, but this week I challenge you to choose butter, coconut oil, and olive oil over other oils.
Begin to learn how to cook with these fats instead of your other oils.

I’ll be back later this week to talk more about the health benefits of these fats and give you a delicious new recipe to try.

What are the fats you use on a regular basis?  Did you grow up fat free?  Are you excited to have butter back in your life?

I promise to keep bringing you the best and most accurate information on nutrition I can find……….and hopefully with a little bit of humor along the way as well. You can find lots of great information on this blog (check out the tabs above and the archives). You can follow what others are doing for the Real Food Experience using #RealFoodExperience. Make sure to subscribe by email so you don’t miss anything. You can also find lots of great tips, tricks, advice, and fun on my Facebook page and my other social media. Please join us and share us with your friends!