Healthy Eating part 3 – Playing with your fat.

VS



I love fat. I love fat more than candy, ask Brandon, I’ll take a fry any day over any sort of sugary sweet. I’ll take more chips before I head (if ever) for cake. I’m that person that eats the skin off the chicken and whose favorite part of said fowl is the drumstick because of all its juicy, fatty goodness. That’s exactly why donuts are the perfect snack, because even though sugar seldom tempts me, deep fried sugar always lures me in.

That being said, I recognize that I can’t eat like that everyday if I ever want to make it to 30. So that’s why I cook mostly from scratch, because I control exactly what’s going into what I eat AND (this is the important one), it gives me room to experiment – especially with fats. I don’t like to brag, but I’ve made it a point of studying cooking fats because I like to eat them so much.

The nice thing about fats is that not all are bad for you – if you know how to use them.
Let’s look at a few fats:

Omega 3 and Omega 6 – The holy grails. We all know that these are good for us. What some of us may not know is where to get them. And even scarier, some of us may not know that these two essential fatty acids don’t always get along. Allow me to explain.

They’re called “essential” because we need them, but can’t produce them ourselves, thus we have to get them through foods. They can be found in oily fish, mono and polyunsaturated oils, and anything flax or egg. The thing is that we need a lot more Omega 3 than 6 but Omega 6 is easier to get AND it tends to suppress Omega 3 (a battle for the ages). So we need to learn how to balance our good fats so they actually are good for us and not in vain. So stay away from these oils: palm, soybean, rapeseed and sunflower. And instead use: canola and olive oil. There are more, but those two are the easiest to find and they’ll suit all your needs.

Butter, Lard, Margarine – I think that a good rule of thumb is that if the fat is solid at room temperature, please use sparingly. I personally am a butter fan because I feel good about understanding all the ingredients on the label which are: cream, salt. Plain and simple. Margarine may be made out of mono or polyunsaturated oils, but once they are hydrogenated they get scary and trans-fatty and saturated – so make up your own mind on that. And lard is… as bad as it can get, so only use that on special occasions or if you want to stealthily kill your dinner guests.