January 11, 2008

What Are Monounsaturated Fats?

Monounsaturated fats are fatty acids, often referred to as “good” or “healthy” fats.

They are found mainly in nuts, avocados, olive oil, tea seed oil, grapeseed oil, ground nut oil, peanut oil, flaxseed oil, sesame oil, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and tea-oil Camellia.

Monounsaturated fatty acids promote insulin resistance and lower LDL (bad) cholesterol, while raising HDL (good) cholesterol.

It’s good to concentrate most of your fat intake on these good fats, mostly from nuts and avocados and limit your intake of any processed oils, favoring unheated, cold pressed organic virgin olive oil if you use them. Avoid saturated fats and limit your total fat intake to between 10-20% of your diet. Now it’s important to note that this isn’t 10-20% of the total amount of food, but 10-20% of your total caloric intake. So if you eat 2000 calories in a day, you’ll want to limit your fat calories to 200-400 a day.

You’d be surprised how many fat calories these foods contain. Fat contains 9 calories per gram, compared with 4 calories per gram for protein and carbohydrates, so a little goes far! A handful of nuts, one avocado or one tablespoon of oil easily fills your daily requirement.

I often wondered how much fat I was eating in a day compared to my total calories and I was surprised (actually shocked!) how hight it was. Read more about how I found out how many calories I ate in a day and how I measured it quickly. You don’t need to do it every day, just find out what you normally eat and once you measure it for a week, you can estimate your intake regularly.

To your best health!