Does Eating Fats Make You Fat?

by Michael Sahno, MS APK, TSAC-F

For years doctors and nutritionists have told us not to eat Fatty cuts of beef or to eat the skin on your chicken due to the idea that if we eat these types of foods, the Fat from them would go straight to our waist line and would also increase our cholesterol levels. This is how “skim” and “low-fat” entered into our world and got onto our grocery shelves. This idea is based on a misunderstanding of how the body uses and processes the things that we eat and an inability to understand the effects of different types of Fats on different people. In other words, there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution to eating Fats.

A study in 2018 by Ghada A Soliman showed that eating, “dietary cholesterol increases the risk of heart disease in healthy individuals. However, there is ample evidence that saturated fatty acids and trans-fats increase cardiovascular disease risk”. So,based on this, eating Fats can have a negative impact on your heart health, but does it actually MAKE you fat? That depends. It is important to understand that Fats are what is called “Calorie Dense”. What this means is that they have more energy, or Calories, packed inside of them than Carbohydrates or Protein. Over double. Carbs and Protein each have four (4) Calories per gram. Fats have a whopping nine (9).

This can be concerning when a lot of fad diets call for removing Carbs from what you eat and preach the wonders of increasing the amount of Fats in your daily diet. If you were to follow a diet like this, it would be VERY easy to over do it and inadvertently add double the calories that you normally would have eaten in a day. Add to this the potential risk of increasing cardiovascular disease by not making good choices on the Fats that you eat and now Fats don’t actually seem like a good choice to add to your daily diet.

There is a solution. Fats are not going to make you balloon in weight if you take a moderate approach and enjoy them with a little bit of restraint. Twenty (20) to thirty-five (35) percent of your diet can come from Fats, just try to make sure they come from Unsaturated Fats (fish and olive oil) and limit your intake of Saturated Fats (cheese and butter) and Trans-Fats (vegetable oils) (all of this information is on the food labels or it can be found on the internet). So, you don’t need to worry and trim that steak, just try to enjoy it a few less times a week.