Balance Your Meals with Healthy Fats

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
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Most people find fats confusing. 

They are technically challenging to understand, let alone keep straight:

• Unsaturated vs. Saturated
• Poly vs. Mono Unsaturated
• Omega 3’s vs. 6’s

And there is so much conflicting ‘information’:

• All fats are bad
• Some fats are bad
• All fats are good

Here is the real skinny on healthy fat, a way to cut through this confusion.

Fats are an important part of what you eat.  They are the most energy-dense food, providing taste and satiation to your meals.

Fats also make hormones, modulate your immunity, support your nervous system, transport fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), and form all of your cellular membranes.

Some fats are essential (meaning your body cannot make them, so you have to eat them) - these are the Omega 3’s and 6’s.

After over 30 years of demonizing fat, dietary recommendations now embrace the choice of healthy fats.

So far, so good - but what are healthy fats?

This may be the most conflicted question in all of nutrition.  

Here are some things that almost everyone agrees with:

• Monounsaturated sources of fat are healthy.
• Trans fats are unhealthy (in fact, they have been banned).
• Most people get too many Omega 6’s and too few Omega 3’s.
• Saturated fats increase LDL-cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol), and increased LDL-cholesterol levels increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
• Dietary cholesterol is no longer considered a significant driver of LDL-cholesterol levels.
• Personalized recommendations should be adjusted based on a person’s LDL-cholesterol level and cardiac risk, which physicians easily and routinely do.

Quick Technical Guide to Fats

Here is our take - it is all about balance:

1. Balance your energy
​Think about fats and carbs as providing your energy, with protein for repair and maintenance. If you have followed the guide so far, you have built your meals around healthy protein packages and filled out your plates with healthy veggies, fruits, legumes, and whole grains.  Now balance out your meal with healthy fats for taste, satiation, and of course, to meet your energy needs. 

High fat, low carb can work
Low fat, high carb can work
Medium fat, medium carb can work BUT
High fat, high carb won’t work.

2. Balance your types of fats
​​More than half of your fat should be monounsaturated. 

• Eat plenty of seeds, nuts, and nut butter (peanut, almond, etc.)
• Make olive and avocado oil your default cooking oils.
• Balance the remainder equally from:
  • Polyunsaturated fats - including Omega 3 and Omega 6 essential fats
    • Enjoy fatty fish (salmon, trout, sardines, mackerel) unless, of course, you are vegetarian!
    • Avoid chemically processed seed & vegetable oils - choose expeller-pressed, cold-pressed, virgin, and extra virgin oils.
  • Saturated fats
    • Healthy meats - choose lean cuts, grass-fed, organic if possible.
    • Full fat or partially skimmed dairy (choose grass-fed if affordable)
    • Coconut oil (choose virgin)

3. Balance your Omega 3’s and 6’s

• Be conscious of how much Omega 3’s you are eating.  From an evolutionary perspective, the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in the diet was 1:1.  Since the introduction of cheap, industrial vegetable oils - corn, soybean, safflower, etc. into the Western diet - this ratio has sky-rocketed to 25:1.  At these levels, Omega 6's act as pro-inflammatory agents and likely is a significant contributor to obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease.
• Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) - is the essential omega-3 fatty acid.  ALA can be derived from plant sources - flax, chia seeds, green leafy vegetables, soybean oil, canola, and notably from fish.  ​
• From ALA, we can synthesize the other important omega-3 fatty acids: eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA).  There are some challenges to relying on ALA alone:
  • The efficiency of this conversion is low (especially in the presence of high Omega 6’s)
  • The conversion is lower in men as compared to women. 
  • There is also a common significant loss of function genetic variation with the FADS enzyme that converts ALA to DHA and EPA.  
• As a result, you should obtain EPA and DHA are obtained from your diet (fish) and supplementation (fish or algae oil).

Healthy fats come from whole food sources with minimal processing.

• Avoid trans-fats (now banned from foods) due to the increased health risks.  Everyone agrees these are not healthy and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease.
• Avoid ultra-processed food - these are more likely to be high in saturated fat or trans-fats from hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated polyunsaturated fats. 
• Avoid any oil labeled as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated.
• Avoid fried foods - heating destabilizes the oil resulting in the formation of unhealthy trans fats.  Deep frying fat in restaurants is reused repeatedly, further increasing the likelihood of eating harmful oxidation by-products.
• Avoid chemically processed oils - the top four vegetable oils consumed are soybean, canola, palm, and corn oil - all are refined, bleached, and deodorized. The refining process uses chemical solvents, usually hexane, to separate the oils.  The heating process results in the creation of some trans fats.

Think about the temperature you are cooking at - fats each have a smoke point at which they smoke and burn, yielding harmful free radicals and a burnt flavour.  The more refined the oil, the higher the smoke point as the impurities that can burn at a lower temperature get removed.

*for refined oils, choose products that explicitly state that they are cold-pressed or expeller-pressed.  If the oil does not note how it was processed - assume that it was extracted using chemicals.

Need help applying this to your busy life?
Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health:
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The  TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices.  Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans).  Everything you need to transform your diet.​