Fat notes

Years ago, in a misguided effort to improve my health, I went on a fat free diet for about a year. As it turned out, it was the sickest year of my life; I suffered a bout with shingles and a variety of other unusual ailments. My doctor even suggested an HIV test.

Luckily I ran across an article about fat that listed the various critical roles it plays in the body. One of them was maintenance of a healthy immune system, and after ditching the diet, my good health returned.

Lesson learned. Since then I've found out a lot about the differences between good fats (e.g. monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) and bad fats (e.g. trans fatty acids) and their impact on cholestrol and cardiovascular health. And I read Gary Taubes' fascinating article, "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat," which presents a far more complex picture of how fats affect us than can be easily represented in the FDA's food pyramid.

To understand where this complexity can lead in a simple example, consider a steak--to be precise, a porterhouse, select cut, with a half-centimeter layer of fat, the nutritional constituents of which can be found in the Nutrient Database for Standard Reference at the USDA Web site. After broiling, this porterhouse reduces to a serving of almost equal parts fat and protein. Fifty-one percent of the fat is monounsaturated, of which virtually all (90%) is oleic acid, the same healthy fat that's in olive oil. Saturated fat constitutes 45% of the total fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which is, at the very least, harmless. The remaining 4% of the fat is polyunsaturated, which also improves cholesterol levels. In sum, well over half--and perhaps as much as 70%--of the fat content of a porterhouse will improve cholesterol levels compared to what they would be if bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed instead. The remaining 30% will raise LDL but will also raise HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak rather than carbohydrates might actually improve heart disease risk, although no nutritional authority who hasn't written a high-fat diet book will say this publicly.

The bottom line for improving your health is to pair some common sense (e.g. eat a variety of fresh foods that have been minimally processed) with some knowledge about how specific foods impact the human body (e.g. most plant oils are high in healthy fats; human-engineered fats like partially hydrogenated oils are bad in any amount).

I read a couple of recent articles about fat that I found interesting. The first describes research which shows that many beneficial nutrients, such as beta carotene and lutein, are much better absorbed when consumed with some fat. The second reports on a study that shows how quickly a single meal can affect--for better or worse--cardiovascular health.

UPDATE

I posted a few days ago about misleading stories and video ("If it's good enough for Iraq it's good enough for America"). An article in Harper's magazine provides a fascinating look at how one company placed articles written by the U.S. military in Iraqi newspapers... and wasted huge amounts of tax payer money in the process. Check out Willem Marx's "Misinformation Intern" when the September issue hits the newsstands.

A quote which discusses the company's role in producing some television spots for the U.S.:

We found one company that would produce one of our half-minute TV spots for as little as $10,000. At Iraq's national station, Al Iraqiya, located with Baghdad's old Jewish ghetto, an English-speaking commercial director said he could air the spot during the station's nightly news, the most expensive time, for only $2,000. Production and distribution, then, would cost us around $12,000. The amount Lincoln Group was charging the military for developing, producing, and airing each commercial had already been determined: just over $1 million.