Do you avoid saturated fat? Is a ‘skinny’ coffee you first choice? Is it ‘low-fat’ that you look for on food labels? Many women (and men!) struggle with the fear that eating fat will make them fat. This episodes busts through the myths about fat consumption, and explores the exciting research that shows eating good quality fats will actually make you skinny! The Wellness Women discuss how the best way to get healthy at a cellular level requires you to tip the standard food pyramid on its head. Learn which fats are healthy, explore the difference between ‘good’ fats and ‘bad’ fats, investigate the ketogenic diet, and understand how to improve your eating habits by including essential nutrient-dense foods. The Wellness Women deliver simple food choices that can make an incredible change to how you feel, how your body functions, and how you look. Enjoy this weeks fat-fuelled episode!

For more detailed reading, and an extensive list of published research references, we recommend the New York Times best seller by Dr Mark Hyman: Eat Fat, Get Thin

You can purchase it online or at your nearest bookstore:

http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat-Get-Thin-Sustained/dp/0316338834

Here are 5 great take-home fat facts from Dr Mark Hyman:

1. Sugar, not fat, makes you fat. The average American eats 69 kilos of sugar and 66 kilos of flour that converts to sugar every year. That’s nearly 2kg of sugar and flour combined every day! Australians aren’t that far behind. More sugar means your cells become numb to insulin’s “call.” Your body pumps out more and more insulin to pull your blood sugar levels back down. You can’t burn all the sugar you eat. Inevitably, your body stores it as fat, creating insulin resistance and overall metabolic havoc among other mayhem.

2. Dietary fat is more complex than sugar. There are some 257 names for sugar, but despite very minor variations, they all create the same damage. In other words, sugar is sugar is sugar; it all wreaks havoc on your health. Fat is more complex. We have saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and even trans fats, not to mention subcategories within each group. Some fats are good; others neutral; and yes, a few are bad.

3. Low-fat diets tend to be heart-unhealthy, high-sugar diets. When people eat less fat, they tend to eat more starch or sugar instead and this actually increases their levels of the small, dense cholesterol that causes heart attacks. In fact, studies show 75 percent of people who end up in the emergency room with a heart attack have normal overall cholesterol levels. But what they do have is pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

4. Saturated fat is not your enemy. A review of all the research on saturated fat published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease. As with all fats, quality becomes key here. The fats in a fast-food bacon feedlot cheeseburger will have an entirely different effect than saturated fat in coconut oil. Let’s stop classifying it all as the same.

5. Some fats are unhealthy. They include trans fat and inflammatory vegetable oils. Unfortunately, these fats have increased in our diet as they make us fatter and contribute to inflammation, which plays a role in nearly every chronic disease on the planet.

6. Everyone benefits from more omega 3s. About 99 percent of Americans are deficient in these critical fats. Ideal ways to get them include eating wild or sustainably raised cold-water fish (at least two servings weekly), buying omega-3 rich eggs and taking an omega-3 supplement twice a day with breakfast and dinner that contains 500-1,000 milligrams of omega-3 fats (a ratio of roughly 300 EPA to 200 DHA is ideal).