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Can good fats make you slim?
Olive oil or butter? Whole or skim milk? ELLE dishes on the latest from the experts.
By Denise Wild
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Our diet-crazed culture has a habit of falling hard for half-truths. Several years ago, it was "Cut out the fat and lose the weight," a claim that had us scrutinizing the labels of every package of food. If we managed to completely remove the three-letter word from our diet, we felt like champions. Oils were the first to go, then avocados, followed by nuts and eggs. Not getting the weight-loss results we wanted, we turned a critical eye on carbohydrates and repeated the familiar pattern, swapping our "low-fat" and "fat-free" products with "low-carb" or "carb-free" ones.
But now, with the demise in popularity of the Atkins low-carb diet, we've come full circle and are cautiously eyeing fats again. Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned while testing all those famous low-fat diets, like Scarsdale and Pritikin, was that total elimination is not the answer to our health and diet goals. "In the last 20 years, we've all been raised to believe in low fat, low fat, low fat -- like all fat is evil," says Melanie Rozwadowski, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Pharmacy and Nutrition. The body needs monounsaturates and polyunsaturates -- the so-called "good" fats, like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids -- to function properly. Studies have shown that a deficiency in the right kind of fats can actually lead to weight gain and a host of other health problems, from depression and diabetes to heart disease and inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. In addition, many of the low-fat foods we used to eat are high in calories and sugars and deprive us of the feel-full satisfaction of healthy fats. "There's research to suggest that good fats may help to prevent you from overeating by releasing CCK [cholecystokinin]," says Toronto naturopathic doctor Penny Kendall-Reed. "CCK is the chemical messenger produced by the intestines that tells the brain when your stomach is full. That's why people who are on low-fat diets and foraging for rice cakes still feel hungry."
Of course, not all fats are created equal. Artery-clogging saturated and trans fats found in commercially fried foods, pastries and some dairy and meat products have minimal health benefits and go directly into fat storage. But good fats are essential to weight management: they discourage fat storage and encourage fat burning. One such proven weight-loss fat is conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a polyunsaturated omega-6 found in grass-fed (not grain-fed or soybean-fed) beef and lamb and in safflower oils and supplements derived from safflower. Ongoing studies support the claim that CLA increases metabolic rate, preserving lean muscle tissue and reducing fat, particularly around the abdomen.
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