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Good morning and welcome to Episode 017 of the Train Your Brain Podcast with Dr. Michael Trayford. Every Monday we produce a 30-minute episode. Tuesday through Sunday we produce episodes with five-minute tips. Every episode of the Train Your Brain Podcast features a tip, so you can receive pointers 365 days a year that will help enhance the performance of your brain!
In Episode 017, Dr. Trayford sets the record straight on saturated fat. While science seems to go back and forth, there is wisdom in keeping your saturated fat intake in check. Learn how this element of your diet will help your brain function. Join us!
If you have any concerns regarding the information and applications discussed in this podcast, please consult your physician and a doctor who is experienced in functional neurology. Michael Trayford DC, DACNB is available for consultation by calling (828) 708-5274. Thanks for listening.
We’re going to be talking about things like fat intake and the different types of fats over the course of the coming year. Today we are going to be talking about saturated fats.
Are you familiar with saturated fats?
Jason: Oh are these the bad kind?
Well that’s a bit of a misnomer. They have been classified as the bad kind in the past. Now they’re making resurgence in more of a positive light. But still we need to look at things with a reasonable set of lenses, so to speak.
Basically, what happens is that a study comes out and shows that this fat may raise a certain blood marker that can lead to heart disease. So now it goes on the bad list right?
Jason: Yeah?
Time goes on and then another couple of papers come out to refute that and say well actually no they lower a certain type of blood fat. So then that particular fat goes back on the good list. And there’s this back and forth.
Just as a little primer, saturated fats are solid at room temperature. They are fully loaded with hydrogen atoms, there for saturated, so there’s no empty spaces in the chemical structure, they are entirely loaded with hydrogen atoms. That would be butter, the fats on red meat, things like that. You know you’re familiar with those.
Jason: Mmmm Hmmm
Those wouldn’t be the olive oils and peanut oils. In general, there was a major shift in the 80’s to get away from fats. And what did they do? They replaced everything with sugar.
Jason: Yes!
Then everyone started getting diabetes, so not they understand that fats are important for us.
So the bottom line is that it’s all about moderation. But we do need to limit our saturated fat intake. There is the whole advent of new diets like the Paleo diet and Ketogenic diets and several others. And many of these have been around or a long time, but they’re becoming increasingly popular, because people can lose weight quite rapidly eating high amounts of fat as well as protein and eliminating or significantly restricting their carbohydrate intake.
Now there are pros and cons to all of these diets. We’ll talk about diets in future podcasts and why some are better than others. But frankly we like to steer away from the term diet, because I’ve always told people look at the first three letters in the word diet and that tells you right there…
Jason: Thank You, I’m gonna scrap my diet today then.
There you go! It’s all about awareness and what works for your body.
Saturated fats in general and excess consumption can lead to elevating blood markers like triglycerides, the LDL type cholesterol. They also can have an impact in some cases at lowering the HDL or the good fats in the body.
So there are implications that on both sides of the fence as to the negative and positive aspect of saturated fats.
But just like how you can have too much oxygen, too much water or too much protein. Saturated fats should be consumed with some type of margins, so to speak. So we need to be mindful of how much we’re taking in and not just limiting our diet to a certain class of fats. We need to diversify.
So our brains are made of a significant amount of fat and we need to have varied fats to support that consistency or the make up of our brain so to speak. And we don’t want to limit that to any one category of fats. So having a diet rich in saturated fats at this point in time is not the greatest idea. We need to have saturated fats in our diet. We don’t know what the magic number is at this point there’s all schools of thought on that but diversification of fats is key. And we’ll talk about certain fats in future podcasts like coconut oil, olive oil, like essential fatty acids. But for today, understand too limit your saturated fat intake is critically important.
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