Fats - Designing Your Diet

DESIGNING A DIET

Designing the fat proportions of your diet is a little easier said than done. But essentially it all depends primarily upon the type of diet you are following. Some diets require a higher proportion of fat than others. This is of course entirely dependent upon the result that you are looking to achieve. You must first assess and set your goals. Whatever the diet regime you are following there is of course a cause for fat to be included in there - even in the lowest fat type of diets. There are no no fat diets that make any sense for health or results. There is no place for no fat diets on this website as fats are an essential macronutrient. More essential than carbohydrates. Remember, at all times, that for proper functioning of your system, body and brain, you are in requirement of the essential fats LINOLEIC ACID and ALPHA LINOLENIC ACID. These fats cannot be manufactured from any other substace or fat and cannot be produced by the body itself. This is what makes them essential.

On the lowest fat diets you are still required to eat at least 20grams of fats a day. These should come exclusively from these LINOLEIC ACID and ALPHA LINOLENIC ACID essential fatty acids. Any diet where the fat content is required to be higher - on most diets around 70grams for women and 100grams per day for men, then you should still primarily seek to obtain your fat intake from these essential sources. When you look further into ketogenic, higher fat types of diets, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid some of the other forms of fats. In which case you should aim to consume unsaturated, poly-unsaturated fats and these essential fats ffor as much of your fat intake as possible. Although there is some evidence to suggest on a ketogenic diet that you can get away with eating more of the saturated forms of fats.

On a 15% fat diet (this means that the rest of your total daily calories would come form protein and carbohydrate sources - making upto around 85% of the calorie intake) we would suggest the following:

2 Tablespoons of Flaxseed oil per day
2 Tablespoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil per day
1-2 GLA capsules per day
1 Fish oil capsule per day
2 servings of oily fish per week
Keep all other fats to a minimum by eating protein sources primarily from fish, fowl and very lean cuts of meat. Aim to ensure that all such foods eaten contain less than 20% calories from fats. Remember to calculate the water percentage of foods. This is a very clever tactic of food manufacturers to increase the water volume of their foods to make them appear to be lower percentage fat than what they actually are. There is in fact no such food that is anywhere between only 1 - 10% fat. This is not true. To determine the true fat contents of your food you are going ot have to become very good at scrutinising your food labels and have a little math ready in your head. First of all ignore the fat content per 100 grams of product. This is how they determine the fat content of foods and is misleading. You want to add up the weight of the carbohydrate, protein and fat only. Do not include the water weight of the food source. Once you know the combined total weights of your macro nutrients, you need to determine what the percentage your fat content truly is. So say you buy a product that contains 40 grams of carbohydrates, 5 grams of protein and 6 grams of fat. This means that in total you have 51 grams of calorie providing foods. Your fat content of this food then is 11.8% fat. If the manufacturer of that food had added 50grams of water to their product or meat and thus made your totals out of 100 grams then your fat content would misleadingly look like only 6% fat. This is almost half. Remember, this is only an example. Much worse actually goes on when you look at food sources in the supermarket these days. Remember, also to keep your eye on so called low fat alternative products. The ones that claim that they are 95% fat free! These again, employ the wonderful water weight trick and a little manipulation of carbohydrate and sugars to make a little difference in their products. You will find that what that clever advertising package is actually declaring is that that product is still 5% fat in total after manipulation of the facts. Once you have re-analysed the labels for your own purposes, you will generally find these very poor and high fat products that are grossly misleading the consumer.

As a rule of thumb, your diet should contain no more than 0.75 gm's of fat per Kilo of bodyweight, ie an 80Kg person should keep fats to no more than about 60gm's of fat, even if this results in fat being less than 15% of total daily calories. Especially when you are combining your fats in meals with carbohydrates. When you are consuming a diet that separates your carbohydrates and fat intake, such as the principles outlined within the insulin index then you can generally eat a much higher degree of fat.