Week 4: Fats and Intermittent Fasting

Fats

How Your Body Uses Good Fats

When thinking about fat (and any food) it also pays to use common sense. Why are we blaming a food that humans have successfully eaten for thousands of years on the increasing rates of new lifestyle diseases?

    Good fats are important for our health – they provide energy, brain power, help liver function, nerve function, gut health and promote a healthy metabolism.

Why are trans fats bad for you, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats good for you, and saturated fats somewhere in-between?

You may wonder ,isn’t fat bad for you?, but your body needs some fat from food. It's a major source of energy. It helps you absorb some vitamins and minerals. Fat is needed to build cell membranes, the vital exterior of each cell, and the sheaths surrounding nerves. It is essential for blood clotting, muscle movement, and inflammation. For long-term health, some fats are better than others. Good fats include monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Bad ones include industrial-made trans fats. Saturated fats fall somewhere in the middle.

More important, not all fats are alike. Saturated fat, found mainly in meat and dairy foods, contributes to clogged arteries and cardiovascular disease. But monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, found in plants and healthful oils, actually protect your health by improving your cholesterol profile.

Fat has little direct effect on blood sugar levels. It is a major energy source for your body, and it helps you absorb certain vitamins and nutrients.

Another type of fat needed for a variety of vital physiological functions is the family of omega-3 unsaturated fats. Your body can't make these on its own; it must get them from food. Good sources of omega-3s include fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, sardines, and mackerel. Flaxseeds, walnuts, wheat germ, canola oil, unhydrogenated soybean oil, and flaxseed oil are also rich in omega-3s.

Trans fats are the worst fats for your health. These fats are made when hydrogen is added to healthy unsaturated fats to solidify them and make them less likely to spoil. Trans fats raise harmful LDL cholesterol, lower beneficial HDL cholesterol, increase inflammation, and make blood more likely to clot.

Confused about fats?

Saturated fat

Saturated fat is solid at room temperature, which is why it is also known as "solid fat." It is mostly in animal foods, such as milk, cheese, and meat. Poultry and fish have less saturated fat than red meat. Saturated fat is also in tropical oils, such as coconut oil, palm oil, and cocoa butter. You'll find tropical oils in many snacks and in non-dairy foods, such as coffee creamers and whipped toppings. Foods made with butter, margarine, or shortening (cakes, cookies, and other desserts) have a lot of saturated fat. Saturated fat can raise your cholesterol.

Trans fat

This is a fat that has been changed by a process called hydrogenation. This process increases the shelf life of fat and makes the fat harder at room temperature. Some animal-based foods have small amounts of naturally occurring trans fats. Most trans fat comes from partially hydrogenated oils. Trans fat can raise your cholesterol, so eat as little trans fat as possible.

Unsaturated fat

Unsaturated fat is liquid at room temperature. It is mostly in oils from plants. If you eat unsaturated fat instead of saturated fat, it may help improve your cholesterol levels. Try to eat mostly unsaturated fats. Monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat are types of unsaturated fat.

    Monounsaturated fat: This fat is in avocado, nuts, and vegetable oils, such as canola, olive, and peanut oils. Eating foods that are high in monounsaturated fats may help lower your "bad" LDL cholesterol. Monounsaturated fats may also keep "good" HDL cholesterol levels high. But eating more unsaturated fat without cutting back on saturated fat may not lower your cholesterol.

    Polyunsaturated fat: This type of fat is mainly in vegetable oils such as safflower, sunflower, sesame, soybean, and corn oils. Polyunsaturated fat is also the main fat found in seafood. Eating polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat may lower LDL cholesterol. The two types of polyunsaturated fats are omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found in foods from plants like soybean oil, canola oil, walnuts, and flaxseed. They are also found in fatty fish and shellfish as eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Salmon, anchovies, herring, sardines,  oysters, trout,  mackerel, and are high in EPA and DHA and lower in mercury.

        Omega-6 fatty acids are found mostly in liquid vegetable oils like soybean oil, corn oil, and safflower oil.

Dr Jason Fung explains the obesity epidemic in a great analogy:

Many of us are buying more groceries and never emptying the fridge. With the fridge always full, there’s no need to access all the food in the freezer. “You need to empty out the fridge before you can start using the food in the freezer.”

If your glycogen ‘fridge’ is full, you will not use any of your fat in the ‘freezer’. If you need 200 calories of energy to go for a walk, you take that exclusively out of the glycogen with none of the fat being burned.

The body can either burn sugar (the fridge) or fat (the freezer), but not both. This is controlled partially by insulin, and also directly by the Randle cycle – first described in 1963 and sometimes called the glucose-fatty acid cycle.

The first thing you need to do is clear out the sugar in your refrigerator. However, if you are continually filling up your fridge 3-6 times a day with sugar, then you will never start burning the fat in the freezer.

There is one more critical input into the analogy. How easy is it to get food energy from the freezer? If the freezer is in the basement behind steel gates and barred shut, then it will be very difficult to get the fat out. Insulin is the key to accessing the locked freezer. If your insulin is high from insulin resistance, you may find that your body is not able to get at the fat in the freezer.

So how do we access our freezer?

If our goal is to lose fat, a simple calories in calories out approach may not be enough. During the majority of human evolution fats were relatively scarce and hard to come by in our diet and our bodies evolved to hold on and store fats for us to be able to survive periods when food was in short supply.

That’s not the case anymore, now we have constant access to food and in general the feeling of real hunger is quite rare.

By doing exercise in a fasted state without the availability of carbohydrates for energy our bodies are able to convert our fat back into usable energy,  by combing intermittent fasting with our exercise program and with a little more care with daily food habits we are more likely to see improvement in our body fat percentage than just by counting calories.

Intermittent fasting

What is intermittent fasting?

Many diets focus on what to eat, but intermittent fasting is all about when you eat.

With intermittent fasting, you only eat during a specific time. Fasting for a certain number of hours each day or eating just one meal a couple days a week, can help your body burn fat. And scientific evidence points to some health benefits, as well.

How does intermittent fasting work?

There are several different ways to do intermittent fasting, but they are all based on choosing regular time periods to eat and fast. For instance, you might try eating only during an eight-hour period each day and fast for the remainder. Or you might choose to eat only one meal a day two days a week. There are many different intermittent fasting schedules.

Mattson says that after hours without food, the body exhausts its sugar stores and starts burning fat. He refers to this as metabolic switching.

Intermittent fasting works by prolonging the period when your body has burned through the calories consumed during your last meal and begins burning fat.

Intermittent Fasting Plans

You can pick a daily approach, which restricts daily eating to one six- to eight-hour period each day. For instance, you may choose to try 16/8 fasting: eating for eight hours and fasting for 16.

What can I eat while intermittent fasting?

During the times when you’re not eating, water and zero-calorie beverages such as black coffee and tea are permitted.

And during your eating periods, “eating normally” does not mean going crazy. You’re not likely to lose weight or get healthier if you pack your feeding times with high-calorie junk food, super-sized fried items and treats.

Research shows that the intermittent fasting periods do more than burn fat. Mattson explains, “When changes occur with this metabolic switch, it affects the body and brain.”

One of Mattson’s studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed data about a range of health benefits associated with the practice. These include a longer life, a leaner body and a sharper mind.

“Many things happen during intermittent fasting that can protect organs against chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, age-related neurodegenerative disorders, even inflammatory bowel disease and many cancers,” he says.

Weight loss can be difficult, but could intermittent fasting help?

During intermittent fasting, individuals use specific periods of eating — typically within an eight-to-10 hour window — to lose weight,

The premise behind intermittent fasting is relatively simple, she says: “When our insulin levels go down far enough and for long enough, as they do during a fasting period, we’re able burn off fat.”

Insulin levels drop when a person is not consuming food. During a period of fasting, decreasing insulin levels cause cells to release stored glucose as energy. Repeating this process regularly, as with intermittent fasting, leads to weight loss.

Intermittent fasting also allows the GI tract to rest and repair while in a state of fasting. “This is when your body is able to use fat stored in your cells as fuel, so you’re burning fat instead of storing it, which leads to weight loss,”

A Harvard research study also reveals how intermittent fasting may slow the aging process through weight loss, lower blood pressure and reduced cholesterol.

How exactly does intermittent fasting work?

Intermittent fasting can be difficult, but as your body adjusts to a new way of consuming foods, the diet gets easier. The overall idea is to be more aware of what and when you’re eating. It gives you limits and boundaries that many people find helpful.

Along with intermittent fasting, we promote daily exercise, avoiding sugars, and choosing fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats.

What is the most effective fasting time window?

Fat burning typically begins after approximately 12 hours of fasting and escalates between 16 and 24 hours of fasting.

How many days a week is this fasting recommended?

Typically, people fast for up to 16 hours each day. This is usually done by skipping breakfast in the morning after eating the final meal of the day on the previous day. There is also a pattern of intermittent fasting that involves going 24 hours without food up to two times per week.

Are there certain beverages that should be consumed during the fasting period?

Water … and plenty of it. If you plan to engage in fasting, be sure to get lots of fluids in during the hours you’re not eating solid food. Vegetable, chicken or bone broth can also be consumed. Besides weight loss, are there other benefits to intermittent fasting?

Does it involve counting calories?

Not necessarily, but if you’re cutting out snacks before bed and going for longer periods of time without eating, your calorie count will decline. Also, when you follow a mostly plant-based diet, you’re consuming foods that are naturally lower in calories.