Understanding Dietary Fats

We have been getting a lot of really interesting feedback from the disease delusion. And one of the areas that seems to be most interesting to the reader has to do with this dietary fat question. What is the story about dietary fats? Are they good, bad or indifferent? Well, we certainly know that they are the most calorie rich form of the macronutrients, about 9 calories per gram. And a lot of energy is compressed into the fat molecule. But we also recognize that they come in different families. They come in saturated and unsaturated and monounsaturated. So we have polyunsaturated, monounsaturated and saturated. And within the saturated fat family, we have three subclasses, and those are the long chain saturated fatty acids, like stearic acid, and the medium chain saturated fatty acids like caprylic acid, like you find in coconut oil, and then the short chain fatty acids like butyric acid that you find in certain types of oils. But generally these are fats that are broken down by metabolism, like from gut bacteria. So you can see there's quite an array, in fact, literally thousands of different fatty acid molecules that then relate to dietary fats. Now, how do we make this story simple? We make the story simple by saying that there are certain types of these fatty acid families that appear to be more problematic relative to the body's ability to metabolize, ingest, digest and excrete waste products without any adverse effects and deposition into tissues in such a way that it would create harm. The long chain fatty acids of the saturated family are generally considered to be some of the more problematic fatty acids when consumed in excess amounts. There are also carriers of other things that come along with them, like toxic fat. Soluble chemicals often reside in foods associated with the saturated long chain fatty acids. So hormones and pesticides and things of that nature can be transported along with those long chain saturated fatty acids. The shorter chain fatty acids, as I said, have more beneficial effects. Medium chain triglycerides and medium chain fatty acids like caprylic acid tend to go directly into the metabolism in the mitochondria, the energy powerhouse of the cell. So they have a beneficial energy giving effect without the deposition in the tissues in storage, as do some of these longer chain saturated fatty acids. So you notice that I'm saying that this is a lot more complicated than just saying is fat good or is fat bad? That tends to overly simplify and reduce to a simplicity and reduce actually to the understanding point of how fats actually work in the body. We could use a similar argument as it relates to carbohydrate as well, because we know there are different forms of carbohydrate. So what I'm really trying to get you to understand is that we don't take a position in the book the Disease Delusion around a macronutrient being good or bad carbohydrate, fat or protein. What we really talk about is the individual constitution of those principles within those families and how they influence human physiology and in general. In fact, the long chain saturated fatty acids in excess are difficult to metabolize, difficult to transport, difficult, and have a greater adverse impact upon cellular physiology than the shorter chain long chain fatty acids like caprylic acid and or epa, dha, oleic acid, or even the alpha linolenic acid found in flaxseed oil. So that's kind of where we stand on this. In a broad summary, they're not good and bad fats, but rather what we're talking about is the way that they're metabolized and managed in the body with individual unique physiology in the complex diet without labels that kind of lead to simplicity of misunderstanding rather than clarity. So what should you do? My feeling is we stay away from the long chain saturated fats to the extent possible. We try to stay with the vegetable oil, fats and oils that are more liquid at room temperature. And we try to stay with things that are medium chain triglycerides that feed into energy economy more effectively than the long chain saturated fatty acids. That's the story for today.