When I was 15 years old I remember going through a health phase of not eating anything fried in oil or high in fat. I think what fueled my motivation for change was the fact that I wanted a six pack and I felt that eating fat was stifling my progress. I remember vehemently rejecting crisps, fried chicken, ghee and anything else glazed with any sort of oil. Plus every other day or so, I’d hit the stationary bike, cycling until I reached the ‘999 calories burnt’ mark on the monitor. I’d stop, drenched in sweat, when the monitor reset back to ‘000’, and ended the training with a fruit smoothie.
You could say I was following mainstream health advice, and some of you reading this genuinely may not find any faults in the way I was looking after my health back then. I can’t blame you (but hopefully you’ll learn to appreciate how wrong I was). Not being able to avoid all fats, I followed that mainstream advice again that said that rapeseed oil was a ‘healthier’ oil, so I asked my mother to use this instead of coconut oil in her dishes. Plus rapeseed oil came in beautiful glass bottles and were made from flowers, so how could it not be healthier than stodgy coconut oil?
Nearly 15 years on, I have come to realise that everything I did back then in effort to improve my health likely did the opposite. Rapeseed oil consumption was likely helping me gain fat whilst also predisposing my body to inflammation. I’m now realising that 99.99% of mainstream advice is either garbage or not nuanced enough. This was all self-taught by the way. I don’t remember having a single lecture on nutrition in medical school!
Fat isn’t a singular entity you see, but an umbrella term to describe a wide array of molecules with similar structures. Some fats are better for us than others. Others are required in certain biochemical reactions. And we are unable to make other sorts of fats, these are termed ‘essential’ and need to be consumed.
All fats are made of long chains of carbon atoms and they are named by how these carbon atoms are related to each other. Some carbon atoms are linked to each other by single bonds and others are linked by double bonds. Double bonds can react with hydrogen to form single bonds.
I have a feeling that many people think that saturated fats “saturate” blood vessels and that’s why they are called that. Same with the word ‘fat’ and becoming fat. This is not the case. And this also highlights the detrimental impact that language can have on human behaviour and thus culture in general.
No, saturated fats are called so because they contain a chain of predominantly single bonds as each carbon atom is linked to another carbon atom and a hydrogen – therefore they are saturated with hydrogen atoms. Unsaturated fats contain carbon double bonds. Monounsaturated fats contain one double bond and polyunsaturated fats contain many double carbon bonds.
Saturated fats tend to have higher melting points and therefore tend to be solids at room temperature. Coconut oil is a good example of an oil predominantly formed of saturated fats, olive oil is high in monounsaturated fatty acids and safflower oil is high in polyunsaturated fats.
Saturated and unsaturated fats are further defined via the number of carbon molecules they contain, and unsaturated fats are further subdivided by where their double bond is located. Below are good examples of three different types of fat.
By the way, I commonly use the term ‘‘fatty acids’ and ‘fats’ interchangeably. They are slightly different, but this understanding will not change how you approach either.