Eating Some Fat is Part of a Healthy Diet

Fat has taken a bad rap over the years but, it is very essential to your health and well being.  “Eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet” has been the mantra for healthy eating for decades now. Touted as a way to lose weight and prevent heart disease and other chronic conditions, millions of people have followed this advice. Seeing a tremendous marketing opportunity, food companies re-engineered thousands of foods to be lower in fat or fat free. The low-fat approach to eating may have made a difference for the occasional individual, but as a nation it has not helped us control our weight or become healthier. In the 1960s, fats and oils supplied Americans with about 45 percent of their calories and about 13 percent of the population was obese and less than 1 percent had type 2 diabetes. Today Americans take in less fat, getting about 33 percent of calories from fats and oils, yet 34 percent of the population is obese and 8 percent has diabetes (mostly type 2).

Your body packages fat and cholesterol into tiny protein-covered particles called lipoprotein in order to get them into your blood stream. Some of these lipoproteins are big and fluffy, and others are small and dense. However, the most important ones to remember for your health and well-being are low-density lipoproteins, high-density lipoproteins, and triglycerides as explained below.

Low-density lipoproteins (LDL) carry cholesterol form your liver to the rest of your body. Your cells latch onto these particles and extract fat and cholesterol from them. When there is too much LDL cholesterol in your blood, these particles can form deposits in the walls of your coronary arties and other arties throughout your body. These deposits, called plaque can cause your arties to narrow and limit blood flow resulting in a heart attack or stroke. Thus LDL cholesterol is called your bad cholesterol.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL) scavenge cholesterol from your bloodstream, from your LDL, and from your artery walls and ferry it back to your liver for disposal. Thus HDL cholesterol is referred to as your good cholesterol.

Triglycerides make up most of the fat that you eat and that travels through your bloodstream. Triglycerides are your body’s main vehicle for transporting fats to your cells and thus, are very important for your good health. However, an excess of triglycerides can be unhealthy.

The type of fat your diet determines to a large extent the amount of total and LDL cholesterol in your bloodstream. Cholesterol in food matters too, but not nearly as much. You can basically break the fats in your diet into three categories; good, bad, and very bad.

Good Fats

Unsaturated fats are called good fats because they can improve blood cholesterol levels, ease inflammation, stabilize heart rhythms, and play a number of other beneficial roles. Unsaturated fats are predominantly found in foods from plants, such as vegetable oils, nuts, and seeds. They are liquid at room temperature.

Further, there are two types of unsaturated fats. First monounsaturated fats which are found in high concentrations in canola, peanut, and olive oils; avocados; nuts such as almonds, hazelnuts, and pecans; and seeds such as pumpkin and sesame seeds. Secondly, polyunsaturated fats which are found in high concentrations in sunflower, corn, soybean, and flaxseed oils, and also in foods such as walnuts, flax seeds and fish.

Research has shown that replacing carbohydrates in your diet with good fats reduces harmful levels of LDL and increases protective HDL in your bloodstream. A randomized trail known as the Optimal Macronutrient Intake Trial for Heart Health showed that replacing a carbohydrate-rich diet with one rich in unsaturated fat, predominantly monounsaturated fats lowers blood pressure, improves lipid levels, and reduces the estimated cardiovascular risk.

Bad Fats

Saturated fats are called bad fats because they increase your total cholesterol level by elevating your harmful LDL. Your body can make all the saturated fat that it needs, so you don’t need to get any in your diet. In the US and other developed countries saturated fats come mainly from meat, seafood, poultry with skin, and whole-milk dairy products. A few plant sources are also high in saturated fats, such as coconuts and coconut oil, palm oil, and palm kernel oil.

As general rule it’s a good idea to keep your intake of saturated fats as low as possible. Saturated fats are a part of many foods, including vegetable oils that are mainly unsaturated fats, so you can’t totally eliminate them from your diet. Red meat and dairy fats are the main sources of saturated fats in most people’s diets, so minimizing them in your diet is the primary way to reduce your intake of saturated fat.

Very Bad Fats

Trans fatty acids, more commonly known as trans fats are made by heating liquid vegetable oils in the presence of hydrogen gas, a process called hydrogenation. Partially hydrogenating vegetable oils make them more stable and less likely to spoil. It also converts the oil into a solid which makes transportation easier. Partially hydrogenated oils can also withstand repeated heating without breaking down, which makes them ideal for frying fast foods. This is why partially hydrogenated oils have been a mainstay of restaurants and the food industry.

Trans fats are worse for cholesterol levels than saturated fats because they raise bad LDL and lower good HDL. They also increase inflammation, an over-activity of the immune system that has been implicated in heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. Even small amounts of trans fats in diet can have harmful health effects. For every extra 2 percent of calories from trans fat daily (the amount in a medium order of fast food French fries) the risk of coronary heart disease increases by 23 percent. It is estimated that eliminating trans fats from the US food supply would prevent between 6 and 19 percent of heart attacks and related deaths (more than 200,000) each year.

 Dr. Donal Layman, professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois has developed the most balanced dietary plan that I have seen in my 20 years in the health and fitness industry.  It's a system called Metaboliq manufactured by a company called Qivana.  I follow this system everyday in my diet.  Please send me an email at darvis@fit-to-be.com if wish to receive more information about this amazing weight management system.

Bad Cholesterol - Not Really

Another great article by Dr. Donald K. Layman

Cholesterol may be the most misunderstood molecule in the body. For years, the public was told that cholesterol was hazardous to health. Dietary guidelines recommended lowering cholesterol intake for heart health … and Americans did. From 1980 to 2000, Americans lowered daily cholesterol intake from about 700 mg (milligrams) to less than 300 mg and it had NO EFFECT AT ALL on risk of heart disease. Oops! It’s time to consider the rest of the story.

Everyone has heard about cholesterol and most adults know their cholesterol numbers including total cholesterol (TC), LDL cholesterol ("bad cholesterol"), and HDL cholesterol ("good cholesterol").  Most physicians will tell you that TC should be less than 200 mg/dl and LDL less than 130mg/dl (or even 45mg/dl). However, just using these numbers ignores the true facts about the roles of cholesterol in the body.

Cholesterol is absolutely essential for health. We need about 1000 mg of cholesterol everyday. Cholesterol is essential to build and repair cell walls; it’s the starting point to make steroid hormones such as estrogen and testosterone; it’s required to form bile for digestion of dietary fats; and it’s a major part of the insulation (ie. myelin sheath) that surrounds and protects every nerve in the body. Cholesterol is so critical to life that it would be an essential nutrient just like vitamins or amino acids except that we make it.

Our bodies make cholesterol in the liver and then send it out to every organ and cell throughout the body. Since cholesterol is a type of fat, it is not soluble in water and it has to be carried by proteins to move through the blood. LDL and HDL are the cholesterol carriers. These cholesterol transporters are called lipoproteins. LDL (low density lipoprotein) serves to carry cholesterol from the liver out to the cells. To be sure that every cell gets enough cholesterol, we produce more total cholesterol and more LDL than necessary. Because we must always have more than we need, the body created HDL (high density lipoprotein) as the return system. The extra cholesterol on LDL not needed by cells is picked up by HDL and returned to the liver. The liver sees the returning HDL and recognizes it made too much so it slows down LDL production. So the amounts of LDL and HDL in the blood represent a constantly changing balance of cholesterol production and removal. 

The common statement that LDL is “bad cholesterol” could not be further from the truth. Without LDL you would die within weeks. That is one of the reasons why low LDL (and low TC) relates to increase risk of stroke and risk of muscle pains. These are facts that pharmaceutical companies and physicians list in the fine print when they prescribe statin drugs that decrease normal liver production of cholesterol. 

The more important cholesterol number is the balance between LDL and HDL or the LDL/HDL ratio. Ideally this ratio should be 70 and have no risk of heart disease. 

There is one more important fact about LDL that your doctor never mentions and that’s LDL size. All LDL’s are not alike. Some are large and buoyant and others are small and dense. The large buoyant LDL’s are easy for the body to handle and rapidly removed by HDL, while the small dense LDL’s are difficult to handle, tend to hang around a long time in the blood, and are easy to oxidize. The oxidized LDL’s are the ones that can cause damage to the lining of blood vessels and lead to heart disease. This means you can have an LDL of 135 with large LDL particles and be totally healthy or an LDL of 135 with small dense LDL and be at risk. Unfortunately LDL size is not a test most doctors or clinics can measure, but you should always get your LDL/HDL ratio.

Okay, then what’s the relationship of diet to blood cholesterol? Well, it’s not what you might expect. Contrary to what you’ve heard, LDL and HDL have almost no relationship to dietary cholesterol or fat, but are heavily influenced by carbohydrates. For cholesterol, most Americans eat about 300 mg of cholesterol each day and only about half of that gets absorbed. The liver sees about 150 mg coming in from the diet but still needs a total of 1000 mg, so the liver knows to make the additional 850 mg to get the required daily total. Dietary intake is balanced with liver production. 

The real risk factors are dietary carbohydrates and insulin. Insulin is the problem because it disrupts the liver regulation of cholesterol production and LDL size. When you are 25 years old and physically active you can handle diets that are high in carbohydrates, but as we get older and less physically active the extra carbohydrates lead to excess insulin. The high insulin increases the key enzyme in cholesterol production (the enzyme is called HMG CoA reductase) and disrupts the liver’s ability to balance daily cholesterol needs. The high Carb diet becomes worse if it is also low in protein because that leads to reductions in the ratio of LDL/HDL and increases the small dense LDL’s. So the worse possible health situation is a diet with high Carbs and low protein and a lifestyle with low physical activity. 

These are the metabolic corrections of the METABOLIQ Lifestyle. METABOLIQ is great for weight loss, but it’s also perfect for adult health because it optimizes your LDL and HDL cholesterol system. METABOLIQ corrects the carbohydrate and protein problems and creates the metabolic balance that your body needs for long-term health. We always emphasize that Qivana is about systems approach to health and balancing the LDL-HDL system is yet another example of the amazing science behind the Qivana products.

For your health,
Dr. Donald K. Layman
Qivana, CSO


Dr. Donald K. Layman is Professor Emeritus of Nutrition in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois. With more than 33 years of teaching and research experience, Dr. Layman has numerous awards and recognitions, including awards from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, the National Institutes of Health and the Nutrition and Metabolism Society.

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