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Health NutritionAre Fats and Dating One And The Same?by Emily Bender Do you ever feel a tad confused about fats these days? I do. One minute I read that I have to eat a low-fat diet to be healthy and the next minute I read that all my problems will be solved by eating one particular kind of fat or another. It’s a bit hard to keep up. Omega-3 fats, Omega-6 fats, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, trans fats, oleic acid, DHA, EPA--I am sure all you health conscious readers have heard or read these terms a million times. I’d like to give you some tools to sort this all out so you can make truly informed decisions about what you eat.Fat is a macronutrient, like protein and carbohydrates. Notice that it is called a macronutrient, not a macro-evil-and-deadly-substance. That means that we need it to survive. While most of us think of fat as something we wish to eliminate from our waistlines, it would be wiser to revere it for its many functions in the body. Fat protects our organs from physical impacts and coats our nerves. Even more shocking, our brains contain large amounts of--gasp--saturated fats! Fatty acids get broken down by the body to create energy, hormones, and hormone-like substances called eicosanoids. But wait, there’s more. You know that dangerous thing called cholesterol (actually an alcohol and not a fat)? Your body uses it to make steroid hormones--estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol--and heal damaged tissue. I’ll break it down to the molecular level to illustrate my point. Hang on everyone, here comes a chemistry lesson! Fats are made up of fatty acids which are chains of carbons bonded to hydrogens, with a carboxyl group, which is made up of a carbon, a hydrogen and 2 oxygens, at the end. The chains come in different lengths, and with different numbers and kinds of bonds Okay, now travel back in time with me to high school chemistry. Remember those styrofoam balls? (It might help to get out pen and paper and start writing this down to help you visualize this. Use C for carbon, H for Hydrogen and O for Oxygen) Imagine a bunch--lets say 18-- styrofoam balls with bit C’s on them(carbons) stuck together with straws to make a straight line. Then add to the picture styrofoam balls with H’s (hydrogens) attached with one straw on the top and bottom of each carbon. Add one more carbon at one end of your chain and then add the carboxyl group (COOH) to the other end. That’s a saturated fatty acid called stearic acid. Like the people we want to date, it is a very stable molecule. All the spaces for bonds with hydrogen are used up, so there is no opportunity for sneaky oxygen radicals--the vixens!--to attach themselves where they are not wanted. Also, because the molecule is in a straight line, it creates a fat which is solid at room temperature. Now, count 8 balls in from the carboxyl group end. Remove the bottom hydrogen from the eighth and the ninth carbons, and stick 2 straws between them like an equals sign to make a double bond. That’s oleic acid, the monounsaturated fat found in olive oil. I had you count to the ninth bond because this is and Omega-9 fatty acid. The omega number indicates the location of the first double bond: for an omega-3 fatty acid you would count to the third bond, and for omega-6 go to the sixth bond. Oleic acid only has one double bond, but a polyunsaturate would have 2 or more. Now each time you add a double bond to a fat, it adds a bend in the molecule, which makes the oil more liquid at room temperature. In addition, the more double bonds you have, the more susceptible the oil is to oxidative damage, which means that stray oxygen molecules can attach in place of one of the hydrogen, creating a damaging free radical. In terms of dating: the more bends in the molecule the more drama in your life because your dating partner is getting progressively less stable. You start to feel like you have to keep a constant eye on her because you notice that there are sexy, home-wrecking oxygens trying to catch her eye. Ok, one more thing before we leave this crazy chemistry lesson. The first is that these fatty acids come in different sizes: short-chain fatty acids, medium-chain fatty acids and long-chain fatty acids. The different sized ones do different things. Many short-chain and medium-chain fatty acids are burned by the body for energy, while longer-chain fatty acids are used for other functions. So now that we’ve gotten basic chemistry out of the way, lets move back into the real world, where things are not always what they seem. Such as when you start going out with a seemingly perfectly average queer person, but 3 months into the relationship you realize that they have a not-so-secret life as a married father of 3 small children in Utah. Now I always assumed that when you said that a fat, such as butter, was a saturated fat, that it was all saturated fat. Mary Enig, PhD, a lipid researcher, enlightened me in her book Know Your Fats. In fact, butter is 64 percent saturated fat, much of it in the form of short or medium chain fatty acids, 28 percent monounsaturated fat, 4 percent polyunsaturated fatty acids, and about 4 percent odd-chain fatty acids (ones that have an odd number of carbons). By the same token, cottonseed oil, which we think of as polyunsaturated actually contains about 30 percent saturates. The bottom line here is that fats are complex substances with multiple actions in the body. I believe that we as consumers have a right and the ability to understand this complexity. Next month we’ll apply this information to daily life and good food choices. For the February issue I’d like to do an “Ask the Nutritionist” column. Please send me any questions you might have at emily@gourmethelping.com and I’ll answer as many of them as I can. Emily is a Certified Nutrition Consultant practicing in Fairfax. She can be reached at Emily@gourmethelping.com. |
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