Wednesday, May 12, 1999
Fat's a fact
Despite its bad reputation, too little can be unhealthy, too
BY SUE MacDONALD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
There is a bit of comfort for Pat Streicher and her colleagues in the modern-day confusion over fat, and that comfort comes as job security.
As long as ordinary people continue to scratch their heads and wonder “Should I eat this or not?” she figures she'll have a job.
Juanita Popplewell counts herself among the head-scratchers.
“You can waste so much time at the grocery,” says the 58-year-old Springdale woman, who had a heart attack last fall. “You've got to stand there and read the labels and figure them all out. It gets so confusing.”
Few food topics can turn as fuzzy as the issue of eating fat.
GOOD, BAD FATS
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Just as Glinda asked Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” it's important to consider whether the fats you're eating are good fats or bad fats. The breakdown:
• Good fats: Generally, unsaturated fats are best for the body and can enhance health while retaining the flavor that fats add to food. Unsaturated fats tend to be liquid at room temperature. They include olive oil, canola oil, flaxseed oil and oils in avocados, nuts, seeds, salmon and tuna.
• Bad fats: Saturated fats are those that tend to clog up arteries by making it difficult for the body to get rid of cholesterol, allowing it to clog up blood vessels. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature and they include lard, butter, cheeses and fats found in meats, palm/palm kernel and coconut oils.
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There's good fat — the kind that keeps skin supple and hair healthy — is essential for the developing brains and spinal cords of infants, in liquid form carries the lumpy bad kind out of the bloodstream as cholesterol, and cushions our bottoms when we fall (at any age).
And there's bad fat, which people usually associate with heart disease and clogged arteries, but it can also lead to a host of other health problems, including snoring, diabetes, varicose veins and labored breathing.
“When people hear the word "fat,' they assume everything about it is bad,” says Ms. Streicher, dietitian manager at the Cholesterol Center at Jewish Hospital. “It's almost harder to convince people to put some of those unsaturated fats back in their diet than it was to get them off fat to begin with.”
It's best when discussing fat to remember quality more than quantity, she says.
Too much of anything is bad, and the important thing about fat is to choose the “good” kinds of fats that can enhance health, not clog it up.
“You can't really lump them all together,” she says.
A dried-out look
Mrs. Popplewell has mastered the basics. The Kentucky native no longer fries most of her food. She's substituted saturated fats with olive and canola oils. She's given up fat-laden pastries for low-fat ice cream, fresh fruits and more vegetables.
As she continues through her cardiac rehabilitation program at Jewish Hospital, she hopes to learn more about what she should — and shouldn't — eat to optimize her recovery and health.
For many people, too little of the good kinds of fat can be just just as unhealthy as too much of the bad kinds of fat, Mrs. Streicher points out.
“You can almost tell when someone walks in if they're on a 10 percent fat diet, because they have a dried-out look to them,” she says. “Their hair is brittle. They complain about their nails splitting. Sometimes they're really cranky, too.”
In fact, patients at the Cholesterol Center are often surprised to learn that they're supposed to add olive oil or canola oil to their diet, or to stir-fry their foods in flavorful peanut oil.
Those are considered unsaturated fats, the kind that provide powerful energy for the body, transport fat-soluble vitamins and keep it functioning.
Watch portion sizes
People are even more surprised, she says, when they are taught to analyze and dissect the information on food labels, including those that proclaim “fat-free.”
“One of our favorites is to hold up a bottle of “I Can't Believe It's Not Butter” spray that's "fat-free,' ” she says. “You're supposed to get 904 servings out of an eight-ounce bottle of vegetable spray. It's only fat-free if used in the amount given, which is about a twelfth-of-a-second of spray. People forget to factor in that portion issue.”
But because people rarely use the spray in serving sizes that small, the product is not without fat calories.
The best advice, she says, is to read labels and choose foods wisely. Avoid or limit foods with saturated fats (see sidebar), and choose foods with unsaturated fats.
And keep flashy new studies and findings in perspective, she says.
In late April, for example, the FDA approved the drug Xenical (orlistat) to treat obesity. Orlistat locks onto an fat-gobbling enzyme in the digestive tract.
The good news: one-third of the fat eaten by a person taking Xenical isn't absorbed by the body. The bad news: that one-third portion of fat is excreted, and the drug is recommended only for obese people willing to stick to a low-calorie, low-fat diet.
And that's not all: Xenical removes essential vitamins from the digestive tract and has side effects that include — straight from the manufacturer's study — “oily spotting, flatulence with discharge, fecal urgency, fatty or oily stool, oily evacuation, increased defecation and fecal incontinence.”
“If it sounds too good to be true,” Ms. Streicher says of miracle-sounding products or diets, “it probably is.”
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