Why we need fat and cholesterol in our diets

I have been pleasantly surprised to read that the book by Gittleman and my Nutrition textbook have a lot of similar suggestions on nutrition. This is good because I have always thought that there was too much conflicting information out there. I hope that this will make it easier for me to get a well rounded view on what is a healthy diet for mamas during their pregnancies.

I love this quote:
“I emphasize variety, ensuring consumption of a wide range of vegetables, fruits, protein, low-fat and full-fat milk products, and complex carbohydrates. This means putting lean meat and eggs back into your diet; it means using all the available sources of calcium, like green leafy vegetables, not just dairy products. Variety will give your body maximum exposure to all the essential nutrients from food sources without risking the problems of excesses-gluten intolerance, yeast infections, and degenerative diseases”. Pg. 50

This quote sums up what my idea of a healthy diet should be. I feel like, instead of putting so much energy into cutting out things, that we should put more energy into finding and adding more of a variety of foods into our diets. An example would be that people have become afraid of red meats, and have therefore cut them out of their lives and now are having hard times coming up with good sources of b-12 and iron, or that our saturated fat intake (which isn’t evil, just needs to be curved) is up because people are forgetting about the vegetable sources of calcium in our diets like dark leafy greens and are consuming so much dairy products that they are eating too much saturated fat from dairy.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time reading about cholesterol….dun dun duhhhhhh (that is supposed to be suspenseful music, if you couldn’t tell). What I learned is that there are actually two kinds of cholesterol, dietary and blood. Our body actually creates and need cholesterol and is considered “so vital that it is contained in practically every cell of the body and aids in cell membrane repair” pg.52. What I am finding is that our body actually makes most of its own cholesterol and takes very little from the dietary cholesterol stores. There are also studies that suggest that it is not necessarily the cholesterol in food, but the oxidized cholesterol after you cook it that poses the problem: “it is not pure cholesterol that creates artery-clogging plaque, but rather the toxic substances produced by the oxidation of cholesterol. Oxidized derivatives of cholesterol are unstable and decompose into free radicals, which damage blood vessel walls.” Pg. 55

My conclusion at the end of these chapters is that we need fats in our diets! Fats provide energy, it provides warmth, cushion, and allows our bodies to ingest those ever important fat soluble vitamins. It is needed for hormone production and body development, so cutting fat out of our diets completely is actually detrimental to our health. I am going to make the conscious effort to eat a better variety of foods so that I will be more likely to get all of the nutrients my body needs. Next in the book is about the role that sugar and carbohydrates play on our bodies. Until next time!