Fats and Diabetes

If you have rudimentary understanding of fats, you've probably picked up the standard take on the subject. That is, saturated fat is bad and mono and polyunsaturated fats are good. That popular oversimplification is very misleading. For one thing, all naturally occurring fats are actually mixtures of different kinds of fatty acids. The fat found in beef, for instance, contains a mixture of saturated and mono unsaturated fats, in fact, there's actually more unsaturated fat (whether from monos or polys) in beef than saturated. Beef fat is solid at room temperature, however, so it's misleadingly lumped into the saturated fat category.
The dietary advice comes down especially hard on saturated fats. That's because a diet high in saturated fats and cholesterol from animal foods is often linked with heart disease. But that link is tenuous at best. The much-touted connection between saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet and high cholesterol levels and heart disease is a lot less solid than you might think. Respected science writer Gary Taubes pointed this out in a watershed article published in the New york Times Magazine in July 2002,
entitled "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?' One significant problem with most studies that claim saturated fats raises cholesterol levels is that they don't take into account carbohydrate consumption. Saturated fat can indeed raise blood cholesterol when it's eaten in the content of a high-carb diet. To date, in studies, saturated fat had little impact on cholesterol levels.
In these same studies, dietary fat had little or no effect on raising blood lipids. You should eat a balance of fats, fortunately, Mothers nature makes that easy for you. You may not know, for example, that in 3.5 ounce pork chop containing 22grams of fat, only 8 grams are saturated. Another 10 grams are monounsaturated fat and the rest are polyunsaturated fat. You don't have to worry about achieving a good balance fats if you simply eat a variety of protein foods and also consume olive oil, olives, avocados, and nuts.
If you've been diagnosed with the metabolic syndrome, prediabetes, or diabetes, your lipid levels and insulin/blood sugar levels aren't what they should be. But avoiding foods containing cholesterol and saturated fat isn't the answer, in fact, avoiding protein rich, fat rich foods in favor of carbohydrates could well make your health problems worse. What will help get your blood sugar under control and improve your blood lipids is balancing dietary fats.

Posted in: Diabetes, facts