Happy Monday! My second On Nutrition column on saturated fats, “Making mindful choices in whole-diet approach,” was in yesterday’s Seattle Times, if you didn’t have a chance to read it yet. This one was a little more practical and food-based than Part 1, looking at how the role saturated fat plays in your diet and your health depends on:
- What other foods you eat (i.e., lots of veggies and real food or lots of processed foods).
- What form the saturated fat comes in (i.e., grass-fed beef or pizza).
- What you are eating instead, if you do try to avoid saturated fat (i.e., nuts, olive oil and other healthy fats, or refined carbohydrates).
As you can see, there are many variables. That’s why it’s always important to took at your entire pattern of eating, rather than zero in on one particular macronutrient (fat, carbohydrates, protein). Here are a few related links I found:
- I love the grass-fed beef we buy every year (we get 1/4 of a steer every fall) from a small, local family ranch. It is every bit as good as the beef we ate in Argentina when we spent two weeks in Buenos Aires in 2009. So I was surprised and dismayed to read that a study found that despite the possible health benefits of organic grass-fed beef, consumers prefer the taste of grain-fed beef. What?!
- And speaking of meat quality, be warned that the New York Times op-ed, “Is that sausage worth this” is a little graphic and really sad, but I honestly think anyone who eats factory-farmed meat should read it.
- I think I included this link last week, about how a whole diet approach for lowering cardiovascular risk has more evidence than low-fat diets, but it’s worth mentioning again.
I spent all weekend (other than a half-day meditation retreat yesterday) working on my new website. It looks good for its debut at the end of the week!
