Those who say all fats are bad for you are, of course, dangerously incorrect. As it turns out, plant-based
fats are powerful cancer fighters, and even saturated fats from plant
sources are now being shown to offer extraordinary health benefits.
If you want to prevent cancer, or you're currently battling colon cancer, prostate cancer or breast cancer, it is essential to get plant-based fats into your diet on a daily basis. What kind of plant-based fats are we talking about? What are the healthy fats?
Canola oil is what I consider a neutral fat, meaning it's not
necessarily a bad fat, but neither is it considered one of the healthier
fats. The healthy fats include extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed
oil, and fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, avocados, and
coconuts.
These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Failure to
include these fats in a meal will result in many of the nutrients
consumed during the meal not being absorbed by the body. That's because
many nutrients are fat-soluble nutrients. Beta carotene, Vitamin D,
and Vitamin E are three such nutrients that require fat in order to be
absorbed and used by the human body, but there are many other nutrients
that also need fats for human metabolism.
Incidentally, these oils do much more than just fight cancer, they also
improve your cardiovascular health and fight weight gain and obesity. The benefits list is a long one.
A fascinating new study published, shows that dietary fat is necessary
for the absorption of nutrients from fruits and vegetables. In the
study, people who consumed salads with fat-free salad dressing absorbed
far less of the helpful phytonutrients and vitamins from spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots than those who consumed their salads with a salad dressing containing fat.
This is interesting research, but not necessarily all that surprising.
We've known for a long time that healthy fats are a critical part of a
healthy diet, and that avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease.
The key is in choosing the right kind of fats for your diet and making
sure you don't overdo the fats, because fats have a very high caloric
density and can add far more calories to your meal than you might
expect.
The fact is we all need fats. Fats helps nutrient absorption, nerve transmission, maintaining cell membrane integrity etc. However, when consumed in excess amount, fats contribute to weight gain, heart disease
and certain types of cancer. Fats are not created equal. Some fats
promote our health positively while other increases our risks of heart
disease. The key is to replace bad fats with good fats in our diet.
In other words, if you take super food supplements without fat, you're
not getting the same benefit as taking the same supplements with a
little bit of fat
The total amount of fat you eat, whether high or low isn't really linked with disease. What really matters is the type of fat you eat.
Do you smell it? Can you taste it? For some people, that unmistakable smell and delectable taste are the main reasons to pry themselves out of bed each morning. What is it? It’s the eye-opening and mouth-watering beverage that’s consumed by an estimated 100 million Americans on a daily basis and it comes from a simple bean – coffee. But, aside from the caffeinated beverage’s eye-opening abilities and addictive flavor, there are many other hidden benefits and we’ve compiled a list of arguably the six best reasons you should be consuming coffee.
Mental Note
Is there anything sadder than seeing an aging loved one drastically losing their mental sharpness? You may be powerless to prevent it, but, according to a recent study, coffee may be able to help you from falling into the same trap. Researchers discovered that participants who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 65% decreased chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease or dementia later on in life. To ensure you’re always drinking enough coffee, make it a point of always consuming coffee with your meals.
Cardiovascular Protection
Anybody who’s serious about health knows the importance of a healthy cardiovascular system. What they may not know is that by simply drinking one or two cups of coffee per day they could have a significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease-related death. According to a Japanese study of more than 76,000 participants, men consuming one to two cups of coffee daily reduced their risk of dying from a cardiovascular disease by as much as 38%. Of course, this still doesn’t excuse you from cardio exercises.
Risk Aversion
Want to lower your risk of death? A National Institutes of Health – AARP Diet and Health study of more than 400,000 people revealed that drinking coffee might be the answer. Between 1995 and 2008, male participants drinking even just one daily cup reduced their risk of death by 6%. Drinking either two to three cups or six or more cups reduced the risk by 10% during the timeframe of the study. The greatest reduction of death risk was 12% in the group drinking four to five cups. Know your limit: five cups.
Diabetes Defense
An alarming 11.8% of American men over the age of 20 have diabetes. Needless to say, it’s a growing concern and one receiving a great deal of attention in the medical community. Between 1986 and 1998 Harvard researchers tracked the coffee consumption and occurrence of type-2 diabetes of more than 40,000 men. They discovered that long-term coffee drinkers had a significantly reduced risk of developing type-2 diabetes and statistics indicated the risk decreased the more they drank. Just remember to limit your sugar!
Pain Reduction
Are you in pain during the course of a typical workday? It’s not that unusual. But, what is surprising is the degree to which many people feel rejuvenated following a coffee break and there may be a reason why. Norwegian researchers observed 48 people performing office work and found that those who consumed coffee only declared a pain-intensity level of 41, whereas participants who didn’t drink any coffee reported having a score of 55. If this study is any indication, you might want to take your coffee breaks literally.
Weight Loss
When you think of coffee, you usually think of the beverage. However, if your focus is weight loss, green coffee extract could be an effective aid. Following a 22-week study of 16 overweight adults, researchers discovered that participants given green coffee bean extract had undergone significant weight loss with 37.5% of them transitioning from being at a pre-obesity weight to a normal weight range. If you’re battling the bulge, consider complementing your workouts by looking at the green bean capsule aisle of your local health nutrition store.
Have you ever stopped to consider what relationship you have with food?
We don’t often think we even have a relationship with food, and yet we do — and it’s pretty intimate.
Think about this: if you’re like me, you spend as much or more time
with food than you do with many of the loved ones in your life — several
hours a day or more.
And consider this: technically, food is just fuel for living. That’s all — nothing else.
And yet … it has become so much more to most of us:
- we use food for pleasure
- we use it for comfort
- we turn to food when we’re sad, depressed, hurt
- we use food to socialize
- we use it as a reward
- we do it when we’re bored
- food can also be a chore
- we use food as gifts
- we turn to food when we’re lonely
- food can be associated with sex
- food is equated to health
- sometimes, food becomes an obsession
- it definitely can be an addiction
- food can make us hate ourselves
- food is the center of many billion-dollar industries
In fact, the huge food-related industries
are at the center of much of our relationship with food: restaurants,
fast-food chains, convenience foods, agribusinesses, distributors,
grocery chains, snack foods, bakeries, coffee shops, dessert chains,
health food, diet foods, supplements, bodybuilding food, and many
others. They spend billions upon billions every year trying to get us to
eat more and more food — their food in particular — and the horrifying
thing is that all this advertising really, really works.
We have been convinced that the answer to almost any problem is food.
You truly love someone? Buy them chocolates, or take them to a
restaurant, or bake them cookies. Want to lose weight? Eat diet food.
Want to get fit? Take our supplements, eat our meat, drink our milk.
Want to be healthy? Eat our healthy products. Want to reward yourself?
There are too many options to name here. Having a bad day? We’ve got the
food for you. Don’t have time? Our food will save time. Want to save
money? Buy super size and “save”.
Food is the answer to everything, apparently.
And yet, we forget that food is just fuel. We need to eat a certain
amount to live and maintain our weight. If we eat more than that, we
will store some of that fuel as fat (or build muscle if we’re
exercising). And how do we lose weight? By eating, apparently — eat diet
food, drink diet shakes, eat Zone bars, eat vegetarian products, eat
meat and other protein sources, eat low-fat products, eat our cereal,
drink our diet soda.
But what if we … just ate less?
Despite what the food industries have convinced us, we don’t need to
eat as much as we do to survive. Sure, maybe eating that much is fun,
and pleasurable, and will stave off boredom, and is fun to do with
friends and family, and so on. But we don’t need to eat that much. Actually, we need to eat less.
The problem isn’t that it’s so difficult to eat less. The problem is
that we have a complicated relationship with food that started when we
were toddlers and has become more and more complicated through the
years, through endless amounts of advertising, of eating when we’re sad
and lonely and happy and bored and at parties and going out and on dates
and watching TV and dieting and so on.
Our complicated relationship with food makes it hard to cut back on how much we eat. So let’s start building a new relationship with food:
- Start recognizing exactly why we eat — is it just for sustenance or
is our hunger often triggered by other things (boredom, socializing,
pleasure, etc.)?
- Start realizing the effects that advertising and the food industries have on how we think about food and how we eat.
- Stop eating when we’re bored, out of habit, as a reward, for pleasure, for comfort, etc.
- Only eat what and how much we need.
- Find other ways to entertain ourselves, comfort ourselves, find pleasure, etc.
- Find other ways to socialize than eating large amounts of food.
- Stop obsessing so much about food.
- End our addiction with certain foods — sugar, for example, or
starches. We can still eat them, but we don’t need to eat them as much.
Think about it: how much simpler would life be if you could end this
complicated relationship with food? Some changes that might happen:
- You’d spend less time thinking about food.
- You’d spend less time preparing food.
- You’d spend less money on food.
- You’d eat less.
- You’d get healthier.
Fasting
I have to give credit to Brad Pilon and his excellent ebook, Eat Stop Eat,
for inspiring this post. Brad shook up a few of my notions about
eating, my assumptions about standard beliefs in the health industry,
and about why we are conditioned to eat so much.
While I haven’t yet decided to try Brad’s super simple method for
losing fat — fast 1-2 days a week and eat normally on other days, plus
strength training — I definitely recommend his book as a way to
challenge the ideas you might have read in magazines or fitness blogs.
But what’s most interesting is how he recommends 24-hour fasts as a
way to transform your relationship with food. By fasting, you learn to
give up your need to eat for reasons other than fuel. You learn that
hunger is often conditioned by other things, and you end that
conditioning. You learn that hunger is OK, and after awhile the fasts
don’t bother you at all. At least, that’s what Brad claims, and it
sounds reasonable to me. I might try fasting for this reason alone.
Now, some of you will object to fasting on the usual grounds — it’s
unhealthy, your body goes into starvation mode, it’ll slow down your
metabolism, your body will start using muscle as fuel, your blood-sugar
levels will drop too low, you won’t have energy. Those are the same
reasons I objected. And I won’t try to refute these ideas — Brad’s book
does a much better job.
Anyway, you don’t need to fast to transform your relationship with food. It’s one way, and I thought it was an interesting idea.
In the end, let’s teach ourselves some simple things: food is just
fuel. Most of us need to eat less. Food isn’t love or entertainment or
anything else like that. It’s just fuel.
