How much should you eat?
Fat gets a lot of negative press, but whatever your size, fat is essential to your physical health and well-being. The most concentrated source of energy from food, it’s one of the key providers of calories and is vital for the proper functioning of the body.
It’s by eating certain types of fat that we get those all-important ‘essential’ fatty acids, which our bodies can’t make. These include linoleic acid (important for children’s growth) and many of the raw materials which help control blood pressure and clotting, inflammation, and other important body functions.
Fat is also an important storage medium for extra calories, helping to insulate the body and provide a source of energy once the body has exhausted the calories from carbohydrates.
It also helps maintain the health of your hair and skin, and aids the absorption and transportation of important fat-soluble vitamins including A, D, E and K.
Finally, and as any butcher will tell you, fat is what gives a meat flavour, which is why meat cut too lean tastes bland.
But you can have too much of a good thing. Aside from making you pile on the pounds, eating excess fat is a principal risk factor associated with heart disease.
Be labelwise
Reading your labels is key to keeping tabs on how much fat you’re eating. Just because a food is labelled ‘reduced fat’ it doesn’t mean that it’s low fat. When a food is ‘90 per cent fat free’, it actually means that it’s 10 per cent fat. As a rule of thumb, bear in mind that 20g of fat per 100g is high, while anything with less than 3g of fat per 100g is a low-fat food.
Bear in mind too that all fats are not equal; there are good fats, and there are bad, saturated fats. Anything with more than 5g per 100g of saturated fats should be kept to a minimum.
Beneficial fats, which contain unsaturated fat, help lower blood cholesterol levels and the risk of heart disease. Good sources include oily fish – choose wild oily fish, such as herring and mackerel, rather than farmed salmon, which can be higher in bad fats – as well as avocados, nuts, and sunflower, rapeseed and olive oils.