FAT, IT IS BEAUTIFUL?

When we say fat, most people get horrified: Me??!! Nooo… I only eat steamed vegetables!

When we talk about palm oil, we get easily scared as well.

But what do we really know about fats?

We need to take into account that they are not all the same.

Some fats are important for our health and we need to eat them as well as proteins and carbohydrates.

Nutritionists recommend we should eat fat that correspond to the 25/30% of our daily kilocalorie intake.

Fats are important as they have essential acid fats, they give us energy, they help protecting our organs from trauma and thanks to them we are able to absorb some vitamins like vitamin A.

In a few words we can forget to absorb the vitamins of a carrot if you don’t put some fat on it 😉

The importance is not to exaggerate. Eating too much fat can cause obesity and cardiovascular diseases.

No matter the fat we are talking about they all correspond to 9 kilocalorie per gram but the quality of kilocalorie changes a lot. Fats are made of acid fats that can be categorized as following:

• Saturated: the so-called “bad” ones that can increase cholesterol and can put us at risk of cardiovascular diseases. They can be found in cheese, fat meat, and tropical oil like the palm or coconut one. We advise a moderate consumption of these fats like 10% of our daily kilocalorie. The so “dreadful” palm oil has not to be avoided like plague (!), we just need to be attentive and learn to read the labels as it can be found in many products on the market today.
• Unsatured: the “good” ones that protect our heart. They can be found in fish, seeds (like flax, sesame etc.), dried oily fruit, and olive oil.
• Trans or hydrogenated fats that can be found in vegetable cheese like margarine and are bad like the saturated ones.

Some important piece of advice:

• Check out the fats we use to cook and to season our dishes.
• Privilege quality over quantity.
• Lower the use of animal fats like butter, lard.
• Favour vegetal fats like the extra virgin olive oil especially if used raw.
• Last but not least, one “golden rule” at Baci di Dama, vary what we eat as much as we can!