A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great (4 page)

We need fat, and the quality of fat is as important as the quantity. Natural monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in extra virgin olive oil, walnuts, salmon, flaxseeds, and avocados can improve blood cholesterol levels and reduce the risk for heart disease. I’m sure you’ve heard of omega-3 fatty acids, a class of polyunsaturated fats known for fighting inflammation, with such huge benefits that they get their
own spotlight
. Good fats make food more satisfying, so having a reasonable amount at every meal can keep you from packing on weight. Eating a piece of toast with mashed avocado curbs your hunger longer than toast with jelly, because the fat in avocado slows down the absorption of carbohydrates in the bread. Your blood sugar stays steadier, and you’re less likely to be elbow-deep in a bag of snacks before your next meal. You also need good fats so your body can absorb more of the fat-soluble vitamins in vegetables, including vitamins D and E (yet another reason fat-free dressings are a bad idea—they do nothing to help you absorb all the good your salads can do).

The bad fats, so we’ve been told for decades, are the saturated fats in meat, butter, cheese, dark chocolate, and coconut. These fats are supposedly responsible for our high cholesterol, heart attacks, and strokes—but this is just plain wrong. The demonization of saturated fat can be traced back to one scientist, Ancel Keys, and his flawed Seven Countries Study that began in the 1950s. Keys’s study compared fat intake and heart disease in seven countries and found those that ate the most fat had the highest rates of heart disease. The sketchy part? Keys
gathered statistics for twenty-two countries, but focused only on the seven that supported his theory that saturated fat contributes to heart disease. If every country studied had been included, the results would show that there was no link. Unfortunately, Keys’s version of the results took hold, the medical community and our government started recommending a low-fat diet, and people loaded up on fat-free frozen waffles and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

As I write this, there’s still no large-scale study showing saturated fat leads to a higher risk of heart disease. This doesn’t mean it’s as beneficial as unsaturated fat, but we know some types of saturated fats are harmless, and others have proven to be helpful. We now know that stearic acid, one of the saturated fats in beef and the main one in dark chocolate, raises HDL (good) cholesterol and has no effect on LDL (bad) cholesterol, and that the lauric acid in virgin coconut oil improves overall cholesterol levels. Keep this in mind when you see butter, whole milk, and beef in a handful of my recipes—you may balk at these saturated fats as part of a healthy diet, but they do, in fact, have a rightful place when they come from a quality source.

The undisputed villains are artificial trans fats, used to increase the shelf life of processed foods like cake mixes, soups, frosting, pastries, and chips. They’re also in the partially hydrogenated oil used for frying at most fast-food joints. Trans fats raise levels of LDL cholesterol and lower those of HDL cholesterol, and have been linked to the extra rolls of belly fat people carry around. Food manufacturers are now required to list the amount of trans fats, so many of them changed their formulas to cut down. But they’re still lurking, thanks to a loophole that allows foods with up to 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving to be listed as zero. Even though the Food and Drug Administration is making moves to eliminate artificial trans fats entirely, the easiest way to avoid them is to lay off processed foods entirely. Check ingredient lists for “partially hydrogenated oil” or “hydrogenated oil”—the giveaway that trans fats are present.

I also stay away from vegetable oils like canola, corn, and soybean. Sure, they’re unsaturated and have some omega-3s, but unlike extra virgin olive oil, they can’t be extracted through pressing naturally. They’re heavily processed, overheated, and deodorized, all of which involves potentially harmful chemicals. It’s mind-boggling to me that these are recommended as healthy when their processing requires the same solvent (hexane) that’s used in shoe glue.

Good fats have to be key players in everything I eat. Extra virgin olive oil has always been a given in my cooking, but I’ve branched out, adding full-fat Greek yogurt and almond butter to breakfast shakes, coconut milk to soups and desserts, chia seeds to oatmeal and snacks. They make food delicious and satisfying—and replacing a lot of refined carbs and sugar with good fats is ultimately how I lost and now maintain my weight. Repeat after me: Good fat does
not
make you fat!

Dark Berry Shake

Mango Green Shake