If our decisions about fat are made based on fear and guilt, how do we eat well? Where's the pleasure, if it is soon wiped away by negative thoughts? What do we really know about fats?
Thinking positive about fats means we need to get to know them. Let's start with the polyunsaturates. We often hear that we should reduce the saturated fat, cut out trans fats, and eat more polyunsaturates. As the title suggests, we are looking here at the balance of these polyunsaturated fatty acids in our diet.
The main issue here is that we have evolved in an environment where we got the main two polyunsaturates, omega-6 and omega-3, in a certain ratio. Our bodies process both of them using the same enzyme. This worked fine for thousands and thousands of years. Then we started getting more of one in our diets. The ratio changed. Things were no longer in balance. Does this make a difference? There are plenty of scientists around who think it does. Why is that?
Firstly, when omega-3 and omega-6 are waiting to be metabolized by the enzymes, omega-6 gets to the head of the queue. If the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is high, the omega-3 doesn't get taken up by the body properly. We can lose the benefit of what we are getting in our diet.
Secondly, this very new change in our diet appears to have some problems. We need some omega-6 in our diet. It is an essential fatty acid; our body needs it but cannot make it. What seems to be happening is that a diet high in omega-6 can give rise to low-level inflammation. There are lots of chronic diseases where inflammation is a feature, often an uncomfortable one, such as in some forms of arthritis.
Third on the list of issues is metabolism. There is some evidence that omega-6 fatty acids encourage the body to store fat. Over thousands of years, when people didn't get so much omega-6 in their diet, those who lived outside the tropics got a glut in autumn. Fattening up before a chilly winter is a sensible thing for a mammal to do, because you can live off your reserves of fat when food is scarce. Our bodies are programmed to store energy in this way, and nature provides the right food at the right time, in autumn, when seeds (nuts, grains and pulses) are abundant. Eating more omega-6 the whole year round may not be a good idea.
The main two polyunsaturates we meet in foods are omega-6 fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids. Our best omega-3s come from fish, but are also found in egg yolks and meats. Strict vegetarians may get them from algae products. Omega-6 polyunsaturates are found in many oils from grains, seeds and nuts. The amount of omega-6 varies, with more than 50% in sunflower, safflower, corn oil and soybean oil. Rapeseed oil has a more favorable ratio.
There are varieties of safflower that have been bred to produce oil with a lower omega-6 content than the regular safflower, and it is also known that grain-fed animals produce meat with more omega-6 than those that graze on green stuff. So you have to be a little bit careful if you want to reduce your omega-6 ratio.
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The mix of partly digested food saturated in acidic stomach juice is progressively routed into the small bowel. This part of our intestinal tract is the location from the majority of digestive enzyme action and also the assimilation of vitamins. The wall of the small intestine presents a very sophisticated pattern of folds and projections.
This style enables the small intestine to possess an absorptive surface approximating the size of a tennis court. This enables for really effective absorption. When the foods mixture is spurted to the little bowel in the stomach, it hardly resembles what we ate. Yet most of the vitamins nevertheless need further digestion to reach their absorbable state.
Very first, bicarbonate created by the pancreas enters the little bowel and neutralizes the acidic food mixture draining from our stomach. Then digestive enzymes that are also produced by our pancreas and bile from the gallbladder and liver make their way towards the little bowel as well. These factors, together with digestive enzymes created by the cells that line the small bowel, will total digestion.
Bile is made up of several ingredients, probably the most outstanding being bile acids (bile salts). During digestion, the small bowel is really a watery place to be. Together using the drinking water entering our digestive tract in foods and beverages, drinking water is also the basis of digestive juices. Water-insoluble ingredients in our diet plan, this kind of as fats, cholesterol, and fat-soluble vitamins, will clump together into droplets within the little bowel.
This would decrease their digestibility and absorption. This really is exactly where bile is available in. Bile acts as an emulsifier or detergent interacting with lipid droplets so that many smaller lipid droplets outcome instead of fewer bigger ones. The benefit to creating numerous smaller lipid droplets is that more contact happens between lipidsand lipid-digesting enzymes.
If bile had been absent, as in certain disorders, lipids would stay as bigger droplets in the small intestine and for that most part remain undigested and unabsorbed and wind up within the feces. Bile is produced by the liver and oozes within the direction from the little intestine 24 hours each day, 7 days a week.
The liver is connected to the little intestine by way of a series of tubes or ducts. Throughout periods of time in-between meals, a few of the bile drains into the gallbladder, exactly where it's stored. Then throughout a meal the gallbladder squeezes the bile out and it heads to the little intestine. This allows for much more bile to become present in the small intestine throughout digestion.
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