Fat Phobia

If you've seen Fat Head, you have an idea why fats have been demonized for the most part. But it's really gotten out of hand, and now advertising has ensured that this cycle of ignorance is going to continue for a very long time. Every other food commercial you see on TV emphasizes that the product has a low amount of fat, if any. Often foods are listed as X calories and Y grams of fat, as if they are independent quantities. I'm really sick of it. Here's a clip of people with bad accents talking about it briefly.

 Fat Free does not necessarily mean "better." Yoplait adds tons of sugar to compensate for the lack of taste. Yogurt is good, but not this crap. Eat Greek yogurt instead: the low- and non-fat versions don't add any sugar and as a result are chock full of protein.

This Seinfeld clip sums up the worst of the ignorance surrounding dietary fat in a satirical fashion.

Recalling Fat Head again, fats are almost the exact opposite of what public opinion would have you believe: they're good for you, even saturated fat. Yes, really.

One kind of fat stands out as being especially good: coconut oil. It's actually a kind of saturated fat, but it's a "medium chain" fat which has some 'magical' properties. Here are two videos on the topic.

But of course there are some bad fats. The processed kinds you don't find in nature.

First, I present to you canola oil. Now this oil just drips with irony (I apologize for that horrible pun). It's touted as one of the "healthiest" oils, but it's chemically derived. And... well, see for yourself:

And then there are the oh-so vilified trans fats. Now, believe it or not, not all kinds of trans fat are as evil as Hitler. But one kind is incredibly bad for you: hydrogenated oil. It's surprisingly common in some processed foods. Try not to eat that at all, if you can help it.

Now here comes the rage-inducing part: FDA rules say that nutritional labels can have rounded-down amounts of whatever is in the food, to the nearest gram. So that means there can be .4 grams in one serving and you can slap a big 'ol shiny sticker on the front that screams "ZERO TRANS FATS!" And that's not all- a 'serving' is a completely arbitrary quantity, and as such it can be exploited. 0.8 grams of trans fats in a serving of a quarter cup? Not a problem, make the serving size half as big and then you can say that there is 0g of trans fats in your product.

Peanut butter is one of the most flagrant abusers of this rule. When you get peanut butter, look at the ingredient list. Don't buy it if hydrogenated oil of any kind is in there. Look instead for "natural" peanut butter. This is the good stuff without the hydrogenated trans fats. 

 See the yellow sticker? No trans fat, my ass!

Hydrogenated oils prevent the natural peanut oil from separating from the rest of the peanut butter, sparing you from having to stir it all the time. This would be nice if it didn't do evil things to your body. There are natural peanut butters, however, that have non-hydrogenated oils added that prevent the oil from separating-- in that case, it's usually palm oil.

Relevant: Tourette's Guy (NSFW language and hilarity)

I don't think I did a good enough job of attacking the stupid cultural phobia of fat, so I might come back to this later. But the take-away lesson is this: calories are what matter most; for yogurt, go Greek; for peanut butter, go natural.

Oh, and avoid skim milk.