The Skinny on Fats: (Why You Need More Saturated Fat) – Nutrition Crash Course Part 3 of 7
This is Part 3 of a 7 Part Nutrition Series. You can find the other parts here:
- Part 1: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/the-big-3
- Part 2: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/nutrition-101
- Part 3: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/fats
- Part 4: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/carbs
- Part 5: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/05/cholesterol
- Part 6: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/gut-health
- Part 7: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/what-to-eat
The third series is all about fats. We’ve been in a narrative that vilifies fats for the last 50 years. Unfortunately, this has led to ever increasing rates of obesity, metabolic dysfunction, and disease. But fats are not the problem, they are the solution. Well, specific types of fat… Not all fats are created equally!
Let’s start this with a brief overview of fats. There are 4 main types of fats that we consume:
Saturated Fats – Healthy fats from mostly animal based meat and dairy sources, rich in energy, nutrients, and value.
Monounsaturated Fats – Naturally occurring fats from olives and avocados, among others, that have benefits for the body. Since we can make these endogenously and tend to get them in a diet, they aren’t a huge concern to focus on.
Polyunsaturated Fats – These are the Omega 3’s (anti-inflammatory) and Omega 6’s (pro-inflammatory) that get a lot of attention. Fish, meat, nuts, oils, and some vegetables are good sources.
Transaturated Fats – Though found in some foods in small amounts, these are typically created in a lab and used to make foods more shelf stable. These really aren’t safe for consumption. Icings, cookies, pastries, shortening, Crisco, and other highly processed foods have these trans fats.
If you’re confused by the whole concept of “should I eat fats or not”, don’t feel bad. Just a quick Google search on fats will reveal a lot of conflicting evidence. Major health institutions still claim that saturated fats are unhealthy and should be avoided or replaced with unsaturated fats. You’ve probably grown up thinking that red meat and butter are bad because of this.
The reality is that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s tackle this from a philosophical perspective and a scientific perspective.
From an ancestral view, humans evolved because of fats. The energy dense nature of this macronutrient allowed our brains to grow and our cognition to form at a rapid pace. Just studying the fossils and skulls of our evolutionary relatives shows a rapid increase in the size of the brain and skull relative to other animals. Additionally, the incredibly acidic pH of our stomachs mirror those of scavengers who need to be able to consume and digest decaying meat.
Fats are a highly prized food source in the wild. Rather than spending hours on end chewing and scouring for low calorie foods in plants, early humans were able to satiate and thrive on fat rich foods found from animals.Over time we became the apex predators, capable of throwing weapons, cooking with fire, and using tools to aggregate more fat, calories, and nutrients.
It’s important to remember that our brains, cells, nervous system, and hormones are all composed of fat at some level. The fat in our diets provides the nutrients required to form these structures.
Additionally, fat is an essential part of actually digesting nutrients. It’s not enough to consume vitamins and minerals – we have to actually be able to absorb them into the body! As discussed in the last article, vitamins are either fat soluble or water soluble. In order to absorb the fat soluble vitamins A,D, E, and K we have to have fat in the diet!
But the right kind of fat! (More on this in a moment…)
If you step back to think about it, our modern dietary guidelines tell us the very nutrition and food sources we used as essential parts of our evolution are the least healthy foods to eat. It’s actually crazy.
Before modern monocrop agricultural practices made certain plants readily available, the lion’s share of nutrition that was available to humans were animal based foods, fruit, and some tubers or sparse vegetation. This shakes out to a lot of saturated fats, some unsaturated fats, fructose, and fiber depending on the season. (Remember, plants don’t grow year round!)
Over the last 50 years as the phobia around fats spread, and the broad advice was to move away from an animal based diet, we replaced these animal fats (mostly saturated fats) with cheap and unnatural oils – vegetable, nut, and seed oils. Butter was replaced with margarine, lard was replaced with vegetable shortening, chickens doubled in physical size and replaced beef, and transsatured fats were created to make all types of fancy dairy substitutes as carb dominant snacks took over food stores.
The major consequence of this was that our consumption of Omega 6 Polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s), specifically linoleic acid, skyrocketed.
Now, we need both Omega 3’s and Omega 6’s in our diet – they are essential and important. The problem is that the amount of Omega 6’s we are consuming has increased much faster relative to Omega 3’s in the last 200 years.
These Omega 6 PUFA’s are high in corn, soy, vegetable oils, seed oils, nuts, seeds, and poultry or pork that are fed diets high in corn and soy (which is almost every conventionally raised pig, turkey, or chicken). That list makes up a HUGE portion of our diets.
Ancestrally speaking, the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 would have been between 1:1-1:4, with about 2% of our fat calories coming from Linoleic Acid. Now that ratio is closer to 1:12, sometimes upwards of 1:50 or higher with 8% or more of our fat calories from Linoleic Acid. Things have gone off the rails.
Why should you care?
Well, if you don’t like holding onto excess body fat then you need to understand that the types of fats you eat dramatically change how your hormones, fat cells, and metabolism, and satiety works.
This will be oversimplified and dumbed down, but I’m going to do my best to summarize an incredibly thorough and well researched perspective put forth by Peter Dobromylskyj from Hyperlipid that posits that different types of fats are metabolized uniquely in the mitochondria which results in a chain of events that impacts the insulin sensitivity at the fat cell.
Mitochondria are parts of cells that create energy. They do this by moving charge particles across a membrane to create a charge. This is the basis of building ATP, or the compounds that store energy. Saturated fats are oxidized differently than unsaturated fats. Specifically, they create more electrons than the mitochondrion can use, which results in superoxide and eventually hydrogen peroxide, called Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Unsaturated fats do not have this same ROS producing effect.
These Reactive Oxygen Species are powerful signals that tell the organism that fat is being oxidized instead of carbohydrates. This does two things: creates insulin resistant fat cells and signals for satiety.
Keep in mind that this is reversible short term physiological insulin resistance, not to be confused with the long term insulin resistance that characterizes diabetes. This simply means that the fat cells are not responding to insulin, taking in sugar, and turning that into fat via a process called de novo lipogenesis.
Why would you want insulin resistant fat cells? Because you want your fat cells to constantly be releasing fatty acids for energy. Think of it like a switch. When the switch is on, fatty acids are flowing out of the cell like water down a drain. When the switch is off, that drain gets plugged up, causing the fat cells to swell, leading to body fat accumulation.
Insulin is the hormone that controls the switch. What matters is whether or not the fat cell listens. Remember, Insulin is the storage hormone that is released in the presence of glucose in the blood (i.e. when carbohydrates are being metabolized). The type of fat you eat will change your fat cell’s response to insulin.
Saturated fats create insulin resistant fat cells.
Eating high carbohydrates with very low fat creates insulin resistant fat cells. (We’ll return to this.)
Unsaturated fats create insulin sensitive fat cells.
Going back to the drain analogy, we want to have a constant flow of fatty acids available for energy, whether or not there is glucose available. This allows our body to flex smoothly between using fatty acids for energy via beta oxidation and using glucose/glycogen for energy when available. This happens in metabolically healthy individuals (only about 12% of the population) and in those who prioritize saturated fats over unsaturated fats.
For an example – Let’s say you have insulin sensitive fat cells and eat a granola bar for a snack. The digestion of glucose triggers insulin to pull the sugar out of your blood stream. This insulin also signals to the fat cells to stop releasing fatty acids since there is a quicker form of energy available and take part in absorbing the glucose to store as fat.
This creates a lag period – there is no glucose in the blood after being absorbed by respective tissues and since the fat cells have stopped releasing fatty acids (the drain is plugged up), there are no fats available for energy either. Hence the energy crash, hunger cravings, and lack of satiety.
To make things worse, if the fat cell hypertrophy (enlargement) continues the adipose tissue literally gets sick and starts malfunctioning… releasing inflammatory cytokines, altering hormone function, and throwing off your normal metabolism. This means you’re not losing fat even in a hypo-caloric state.
Alternatively, if your fat cells remain insulin resistant (from the presence of reactive oxygen species through the oxidation of saturated fatty acids), the fat cells do not participate in glucose uptake, formation of new fat cells, or a cessation of fatty acid release. You don’t have the energy crash or cravings and your body receives signals of satiety from the fat cells.
So, what can you do about it?
I know this will sound crazy but start eating more saturated fats. The best source is from whole foods, specifically well raised animal-based foods like red meat, butter, tallow, eggs, corn and soy free poultry and pork, and dairy (if you tolerate it well).
While that flies in the face of almost every major health guideline from the last half century, it doesn’t take long to look around at the state of our modern epidemic of metabolic dysfunction and disease to get that something isn’t working.87.8% of the US population has some form of a metabolic problem, and the average American has consumed much less red meat, fat, and dairy in the last 70 years, opting for more whole grains, vegetables, poultry, and fiber.
And it hasn’t worked. If it did, we wouldn’t be spending almost a trillion dollars each year on health care for preventable diseases.
Your takeaway from this stage is simple – saturated fats are your friend, unsaturated fats are fine in moderation, and polyunsaturated Omega 6 fatty acids are a problem in excess.
Though the whole process can be complex, the goal is to simply reduce or eliminate foods that have Omega 6 PUFA’s like nuts, seeds, corn, soy, vegetable oils, seed Oils, and Poultry/Pigs fed a conventional diet high in corn and soy.
You’ll still get a small amount in eggs, meat, and certain other foods you eat. And that is ok – remember, these Omega 6’s are essential, important, and part of a healthy diet! Just in moderation.
Should you supplement with Omega 3’s? I mentioned earlier that the Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acid ratio has gotten way out of hand in our modern diet. There are two ways to remedy this – supplement or include more Omega 3 rich foods in your diet OR consume less Omega 6 foods in your diet.
The three Omega 3 fatty acids to note are Alpha-Linoleic Acid (ALA), Eicosapentaenoic Acid (EPA), and Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA). EPA and DHA are the big players for brain function and human use and are found almost exclusively in marine sources. ALA comes from some plants, eggs, meat, and dairy and can be converted to EPA but not at a very high level (only around 8-20%).
Numerous studies tout the benefits of Omega 3’s and they are widely recognized to be very important for cognition and neurological function. Some people even go so far as to say there is no upper limit on how much you can consume. While I don’t fall into that camp, I generally think that incorporating some form of marine supplement weekly is helpful whether that be eating fish, salmon roe, cod liver oil, or fish oil capsules.
So while there isn’t likely a downside to increasing your Omega 3 consumption, understand that the real benefit comes from improving your Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio. Just eating less Omega 6 foods will have the same effect of reducing inflammation in the brain, improving cognition, and bolstering joint health.
Bottom line – Omega 3’s are not magic. And before you go and spend a bunch of money on a fish oil supplement, do the most effective thing and cut out the Omega 6 sources in your diet. That means no fried foods, vegetable oils, nut butters, and soy to start.
If you do want to go the extra mile and add in an Omega 3 supplement, go for quality. The best bet is wild caught salmon roe, followed by small whole fish like sardines and anchovies in water, then wild caught fatty fish, and finally a fish oil pill. If you do the pill, remember that these oils need to be refrigerated at all times to prevent oxidation and becoming rancid. You can go ahead and toss your old fish oils pills if you bought them on the shelf at a store or if they’ve been sitting out on the counter for a while. Sorry… you get what you pay for.
What’s the deal with poultry and pork? I thought that was healthy… When it comes to animals, there are two terms you should know – monogastric digesters and ruminant digesters. Ruminant animals, like cows, elk, bison, and goats, have multiple stomachs where toxins and fats can be metabolized by bacteria longer. Monogastric animals, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and humans, among others, have only one stomach. This means that the fats we eat are the fats we store. Humans cannot make polyunsaturated fatty acids so the only way we store those is by eating them. This is the same for poultry and pork.
Because everyone wants bigger, better, and cheaper, the large food producers are always looking for ways to deliver you highly subsidized food. Most conventional animals are fed a diet high in grains to fatten them up before slaughter. While ruminant animals do a better job of digesting these high Omega 6 PUFA’s and storing them as saturated fats, monogastric animals do not.
This means that poultry and pork have a high level of linoleic acid in the fat. When you eat chicken, turkey, or pig, you’re getting a large dose of Omega 6 PUFA’s. And yes, it adds up and matters. More specifically, I’m not a fan of poultry because there isn’t much fat to begin with. Too much protein without fat doesn’t provide enough nutrition for you to thrive. Go look up Rabbit Starvation.
BUT if you can find soy and corn free pork or poultry, then it’s a whole different ball game! Since these animals just store the fats they eat, if they aren’t fed PUFA’s they won’t store PUFA’s. Pasture raised poultry and pork that are free to rummage and eat a wide variety of foods have a much healthier fat profile. It’s just harder to find.
And in case you’re wondering how to tell if the poultry/pigs are fed corn and soy… if they don’t specify that they are corn and soy free, or claim they are “100% vegetarian fed”, they are. Chickens are omnivores. They roam and eat insects and small critters in addition to plants. The whole “vegetarian fed” claim is a marketing ploy to get you to think it’s healthier. Ironically, this lets them shove these animals into tiny quarters with no real food.
Bottom line – when it comes to what meat to choose, follow these guidelines:
- Ruminant meat is best, (always choose 100% grass finished when possible)
- Poultry and pork are fine when pasture raised or corn and soy free (avoid if you’re unsure)
- Avoid vegetable and seed oils in your cooking, ask for meat cooked in butter at restaurants.
- Choose fish that is wild caught, and limit larger predatory fish that bioaccumulate toxins.
- Fattier cuts of meat are always ideal.
To finish this section, the big thing to remember is that your body thrives off of real food. Fats are an essential part of your health and they have been for millennia. The best source of real fats are animal foods. If you’ve been following the mainstream dietary dogma for years and are still overweight, inflamed, and unhealthy, it’s time to rethink your relationship with fats.
Read part 4 here, all about carbs!
