What are good fats – healthy fat sources
January 7th, 2010 -- Posted in Tips on Healthy Food | 6 Comments »USEFUL FATS
The vital role of fats in maintaining a good health
Don’t try to exclude from your daily ratio the healthy quantity of fats because it may be harmful for your entire organism.
Fats play a vital role in maintaining body temperature and promoting healthy cell function, in maintaining healthy skin and hair. But not all fats are good for human organism and not all of fats are well assimilated by it. It’s still important for organism to receive the daily norm of fats, the good ones. The average daily requirement of Essential Fatty Acids is about 20 grams but the body can utilize only about 10 grams per serving that’s why you should include these 20 grams in 2 of your daily meals.
It is nearly impossible to remove fat completely from the diet and it would be unhealthy to do so. Some fatty acids are essential nutrients (can be produced in organism from other compounds) but need to be consumed in small amounts. Another category of fats required by the body are non-essential and can be produced in organism from other compounds. Women need to be careful not to go too far below the recommended minimum body fat % because they risk losing their ability to menstruate or conceive children. The risks are lower for men.
You may check your daily norm of fats here
Cod-liver oil has a special place among useful fats. Its high efficiency is favored not only by the presence of A and D vitamins, but also due to the presence of a very deficient and necessary product, especially for children, called Arachidonic acid (AA or ARA), which is the most active among poly-unsaturated fat acids. People often feel certain aversion towards this useful fat. Populations from North regions (Chukchi, Aleutians, Eskimos) which live in extreme and difficult conditions don’t have diseases like scurvy, rachitis, hemeralopia, atherosclerosis, hypertonic diseases, even if they consume fat food during all their life. All these factors are probably based on the fact that they consume all their life cod-liver oil and fat of sea animals. We use instead butter or vegetal oil. They use cod-liver oil in preparing any kind of food, and feel no aversion for its smell or taste.
Butterfat, pork, beef, mutton, goose fat – all these are part of animal fats family. The most popular is the butterfat, which is mainly used in form of butter with a high capacity of assimilability (up to 85%) and containing vitamins like A, B2, E, phosphatides, as well as irreplaceable fat acids. All other types of fats are popular for their low level of cholesterol and a normal quantity of phosphatides, but their assimilability depends on the melting temperature. Fats, which have a melting temperature higher than 37°? (pork, beef, mutton fat) are assimilated worse than butter, birds’ fats, as well as liquid vegetal oils.
Nowadays the medical practice proved the fact that in human ratio about 30% of the total calorie content is present in fats we consume. It means that a healthy man with an active physical activity have to eat daily 90-100 g of fats, among it 30% should be of vegetal origin and 70% of animal origin (for example, 15-30 of vegetal oil and 20-25% of butter).
