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Overview

Low-fat diets have been recommended for years as the way to stay healthy. Some people think that all saturated fat is bad, and causes heart disease. This idea started in the 1950s because of a nutritionist named Ancel Keys. However, recent studies have shown that fat isn’t as harmful as we thought it was.

In this passage, you will discover why Americans came to fear saturated fats and how that led to the food industry’s misinterpretation of those fears. Additionally, you will learn what kinds of fat are good for your diet and how they can be incorporated into it.

In this article, you will learn about the Masai tribe of Kenya. They live in a remote area and subsist on a diet composed entirely of meat, blood, and milk. They are able to do so because they have adapted their bodies to digest these foods. You’ll also learn how fats affect both men and women differently in terms of heart disease. Some saturated fats actually help prevent heart disease by lowering cholesterol levels.

Big Idea #1: Not all fats are created equal: butter and meat are saturated fats, and oils are unsaturated fats.

To understand fats, we need to know their chemical composition. Fats consist of chains made up of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms and connected with single or double bonds.

A bond is a type of handshake between two atoms. In a single bond, the atoms are connected by one hand each. In a double bond, they’re holding hands together.

A fat chain is saturated if it has single bonds. It’s unsaturated if it has at least one double bond.

Animal fats and oils are both saturated in nature. They differ in their chemical bonds.

A saturated fat is called so because it has single bonds with hydrogen molecules that cannot bind to any other molecule. This makes the bond stable and keeps the fat solid at room temperature.

Fats with double bonds are more flexible, allowing them to grab other molecules such as oxygen that can cause them to go rancid. These fats tend to be liquid at room temperature and are usually used for cooking purposes.

Saturated and unsaturated fats are two different types of fat. The difference between them is important to understand how they affect your body.

Big Idea #2: Nutritionist Ancel Keys in the 1950s found a link between fat, cholesterol and heart disease.

When you go to the supermarket, there are different types of milk with varying fat contents. For example, there is nonfat, skim and 2 percent milk. Why do we make these distinctions?

Ancel Keys was a nutritionist who studied food and starvation. He developed the K-ration, which was a ready-to-eat meal for soldiers during World War II.

Keys also had a passion for physiology, and began researching heart disease. He combined this with his work in nutrition, and discovered an interesting link: that fat intake affects cholesterol levels. If you have high levels of cholesterol, your chance of getting heart disease is increased.

High levels of cholesterol can be dangerous, but our bodies still need some amount of it to function. Cholesterol is present in the membrane of every cell and controls what goes into and out of cells.

However, cholesterol is also a primary element in building plaque inside arteries. Plaque thickens the walls of arteries causing blood flow to be restricted and thus elevating blood pressure. This eventually leads to serious heart disease. Keys conducted an experiment in which he fed participants meals with either saturated or unsaturated fats, and then measured their serum lipids levels (i.e., the levels of fat-like substances within their blood). He found that those on the preparation high in saturated fats saw a significant increase in serum lipid levels while participants on a more unsaturated diet observed lower serum lipids levels. He concluded from this data source that it was of course better for health if one ate foods higher in unsaturated rather than saturated fats as this meant less chance for heart disease development and progression over time due mainly to elevated cholesterol, etc.. As we’ll learn next however, his data actually led him completely wrong about animal versus vegetable oils…