
This blog is about fats: what to buy, eat, cook with, how to store them. It’s kind of hard to talk about fats without getting a bit “science-y” so if you just want the straight up “what do I do??”, don’t read the bits in italics. That’s the science.
So, what do you think about fats? Mmm lovely butter? Or run a mile from them? Many people are frightened of fats, and not surprisingly, as we still seem to be told different information all the time. Some people seem to avoid them altogether. Fats are one of the 3 main food groups – in other words, the building blocks of food that our body deals with. These are fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Fats are essential for life – we all need them. And we need to get away from the notion that fat makes us fat. Why?
Fats form the building blocks of our cell walls. Without good healthy cell walls, there can be no cell communication.

Science-y bit: The walls of our cells are a double phospholipid layer – basically, fatty acids and phosphorus. We need ALL our cell walls to be healthy so that stuff can get in and out again. Cells are where it all happens. You want the walls of the cells to be nice and flexible. The same goes for the walls of our mitochondria also – those mini-organs within cells that produce energy.
Fats are a clean source of energy, and at 9 calories per gram, a very lovely satiating source of energy. To many, they are also a “clean” energy source, as fat does not create the inflammatory blood sugar spikes we get when we eat e.g. a refined carbohydrate like a bagel.
Fats are needed for the digestion, absorption and assimilation of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. I don’t have the space here to go into the roles of all these lovely vitamins, but suffice it to say they are all important. We need fat to store them, and to get them where they need to be to do their jobs.
But which fats to use? Well, when I was growing up everyone seemed to be suddenly shunning butter and switching instead to polyunsaturated fats like sunflower oil. Saturated fats were cast as the villain. Thankfully, now we know a bit more.
Science-y bit: What’s all this poly- mono- un- saturated business? It’s to do with the double carbon bonds of the fat molecules. Fatty acids form chains, and some “links” in this chain are double, and can be “invaded” by other stuff, like oxygen. Hence oxidised. A poly-unsaturated fat has several double bonds, a mono-unsaturated has one double bond, and a saturated fat has no double bonds, they are all already saturated.
With polyunsaturated fats (like sunflower oil) the industrial process of removing the fat from within the seed is complicated, and the oil has to be de-odourised and go through various yukky processes until it is ready for human consumption, by which point it is already an ultra-processed food. Once it’s in the oil state, it’s much more unstable than when it was inside the lovely protective seed (there is nothing wrong with a pumpkin seed, a sunflower seed, a flaxseed, the oil is kept safely bound up and away from oxygen inside the seed). But then what happens? These oils are decanted into clear plastic bottles, which allows easy exposure to heat and light, which creates further oxidation of these oils. As we know, if oxidative stress in the body is allowed to go untended, it can create havoc. It is at the root of many inflammatory conditions, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, etc etc.
So what can you do? Quite a lot it turns out…
What to cook with? Well, at low temperatures I tend to use olive oil, which is 75% monounsaturated (one carbon bond per chain - see science-y bit, above). I tend to use a saturated fat (stable, no double bonds, see above) for frying at higher temperatures – my oil of choice in this case is coconut oil.

How to buy fats? Buy fats in dark coloured glass bottles, not in clear plastic. Store them in a cool, dark place in your kitchen. I tend never to buy fats in plastic – it reacts with the plastic – so even nut butters I tend to buy in glass.
What else is a good fat? There are lots of good fats – include them at every meal - nuts, seeds, avocados, oily fish like sardines and mackerel, olive oil.
What to avoid? It’s impossible to completely avoid polyunsaturated fats, they’re kind of everywhere – they’re in nuts, seeds, etc, but a good rule of thumb is don’t use the ones in clear plastic bottles, and definitely don’t cook with them. And avoid trans fats like margarine – this is a poly-unsaturated fat made saturated by having hydrogen forced into its double bonds. Very, very toxic.
What about the omega-3, omega-6 thing?
Science-y bit: The Omega business is to do with how many bonds from one end (the methyl end) of the chain the first double bond occurs – the third bond with an omega-3, the sixth with an omega-6 fat. There are also omega-9s, where it is, you guessed it, the ninth double bond.

Ideally, you want omega-3s to make up between 8-12% of the fatty acids in your cell walls. You can measure this using a simple blood test – last time I did mine, I was a bit short at 7%.

Also, if you are at risk of an inflammatory condition, or already have one, consider a deeper dive with testing. You can test the whole range of essential fatty acids. You may have seen, if you follow the posts of the New School of Nutritional Medicine, where I am on the practitioner team, that there is a “new kid on the block” in the world of essential fatty acids. Interestingly, it’s a saturated fat, called C15. There’s a great (and simple to do) test that looks at ALL the fatty acids, for those who really want to drill down. If you don’t already subscribe to the New School’s newsletters, you can do this here.
Phew. Was that ok? Or was that a bit frying pan to fire? Any questions on fats and how they relate to you personally, do book a discovery call here and let’s chat fats.
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