An Education in Fats

Many people are confused about fat; most of us are aware that there are bad fats and good fats; however advertising can give us the wrong ideas about which types of fats are healthy. Fat provides us with a concentrated source of energy, as it is very high in calories. Fat forms our cell membranes and acts as building blocks for hormones and other substances in our body. Fat is also needed to carry fat soluble vitamins in our body, including vitamins E, A, D and K. Basically, fats, (also known as lipids) are composed of fatty acids. There are several different types of rats we can obtain in our diet, and that are found in our body.

What is a fatty acid?

Fatty acids are chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms filling up available bonds. Most of the fats in our body are triglycerides, which are three fatty acids attached to one glycerol molecule. Fatty acids can be classified as saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. This is determined by the presence of double bonds between carbon atoms.

Saturated fatty acids contain carbon atoms that are joined together by single bonds. There are no double bonds between carbon atoms, and each remaining position on the carbon atoms is taken up by a hydrogen atom, so we can say the molecule is saturated with hydrogen atoms. Saturated fatty acid chains can be between four and 28 carbon atoms long. These fatty acids are highly stable, meaning they do not readily react with other molecules, and they do not easily go rancid, or go off. They tolerate heat well, and do not oxidize easily. Saturated fats are usually solid at room temperature. They are commonly found in animal foods such as butter, suet, tallow, and tropical fats like coconut and palm oil. Our body makes saturated fats out of sugar and carbohydrate we have ingested. Saturated; fats are the ones most blamed for raising cholesterol and causing heart disease.

Monounsaturated fatty acids have one double bond between carbon atoms in the carbon chain. This means that two hydrogen atoms are missing. They are usually liquid at room temperature and become solid when refrigerated. Monounsaturated fats are also fairly stable, and do not go rancid or oxidize easily; this means they can be used in cooking. The most common monounsaturated fat in our diet is oleic acid. It is found in large quantities in olive oil and consists of a chain of 18 carbon atoms; there is a double bond between carbons 9 and 10. Oleic acid melts at 13 degrees Celsius, which is why in the fridge, or on a very cold winter’s day olive oil can appear cloudy and solidified. Other oils high in monounsaturated fats are peanut oil and canola oil.

Polyunsaturated fatty acids contain two or more double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain. These fatty acids are liquid at room temperature, and even when refrigerated. They have a very low melting point. The most common polyunsaturated fats in our diet are linoleic acid, which has two double bonds and is also called Omega 6, and alpha-linolenic acid, which has three double bonds and is also called Omega 3. Omega refers to the position of the first double bond, so for example, in linoleic acid the first double bond starts at carbon 6. Omega 6 fats are abundant in popular vegetable oils such as sunflower, safflower, sesame and corn oil. These are promoted as “heart healthy” oils. Omega 6 fats are also found in evening primrose oil, and Omega 3 fats are found in flaxseed oil and fish oil.

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Hypothyroidism

This is a condition whereby the thyroid gland is under active. When the thyroid cannot produce enough T4 and T3 hormones, metabolism slows down; consequently the ability to process cholesterol is also impaired. Studies have shown that subclinical or hidden hypothyroidism may be responsible for elevated cholesterol levels.

Possible symptoms of hypothyroidism include:

–     Weight gain

–     Fatigue

–     Depression

–     Dry skin

–     Hair loss

–     Constipation

–     Sensitivity to cold

–     Muscle cramps, joint pain

If you suspect that you have an under active thyroid gland, ask your doctor for a blood test checking your levels of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH). This is a hormone produced by the pituitary gland in the brain, and if elevated, your thyroid gland may not be able to produce enough hormones.

Stress

Studies have shown that chronic stress raises the risk of heart disease. One possible reason is that psychological and physical stress lead to the release of adrenaline; this causes the release of inflammatory cytokines such as IL6 and IL10. These are a kind of immune system chemical released by white blood cells which promote inflammation in the body, and can promote the development of atherosclerosis. The hormone Cortisol is also released in response to stress. Chronically elevated levels of Cortisol are related to high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and glucose intolerance. Glucose intolerance is a major risk factor for diabetes, and diabetics have higher rates of heart disease. Cortisol is a steroid hormone made out of cholesterol, therefore the more stressed we get, the more cholesterol gets made in our body.

When people feel stressed, they often adopt unhealthy habits. Overeating, binging on sweets, smoking and drinking more alcohol are common ways people deal with stress; each of these factors can raise our cholesterol levels.

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The bad news is that the older we get, the less fertile we become – and that goes for men as well as women. A woman’s eggs have been in her body since before she was born, so that means that at the age of 35 those eggs are older than they were when she was 25. This is one reason why fertility declines after the age of 35. It can take longer to get pregnant and the risk of miscarriage is higher. Biologically, it is more efficient for women to have their families when they are young. But, in recent years, the average age of women having their first baby has been going up because many of us now want to establish ourselves in a career before starting families.

Women going through fertility investigations are often told that they are not conceiving because they have ‘old eggs’. The use of this term has a devastating psychological effect on any woman. And it causes a lot of unnecessary heartache because, although you cannot increase the number of eggs you have left, it is very possible to improve their quality by improving your general health.

So, if you are over the age of 35, rest assured that there is a great deal you can do to increase your fertility. You can also take heart from the story of Sarah, a 42-year-old, who came to me for advice.

Case History

Sarah, a solicitor, was absolutely distraught after her third attempt at IVF treatment. She had been told that the quality of her eggs was no good and that she was now menopausal. She had not responded well to her last course of IVF drugs. But when she asked whether the drugs could perhaps be altered she was told that there was nothing wrong with the technology; she was the problem. You can imagine how devastated she felt. She had emerged from the clinic with the words ‘old eggs’ ringing in her ears.

I told her there was no guarantee but I would aim to get her and her partner in optimum health, which would be of benefit anyway. They followed the plan outlined in Section 6 of this book (taking supplements, and making changes to their diet and lifestyle).

Six months later Sarah was pregnant, and she has since had a healthy baby boy.

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The use of marijuana and cocaine has increased steadily over the years to the point where, for some people, it is part of everyday life. Although still illegal, recreational drug use is increasingly socially acceptable. That does not mean it is healthy or safe. The fact is that these drugs can compromise both your and your partner’s fertility. But, as with alcohol and tobacco, you can stop using recreational drugs and negate the damage to your fertility in a relatively short space of time.

If you continue to use them during a pregnancy, of course, it can have disastrous effects on your developing baby.

The Effects of Some Common Recreational Drugs

•     Marijuana can lower a man’s levels of FSH and LH, two hormones needed to produce sperm. It can also lower his libido. For the woman, marijuana can lead to irregular periods, reducing fertility and sometimes even stopping ovulation.

•     Cocaine users will have a lower sperm count, poorly moving sperm and a high rate of abnormal sperm.

•     Heroin can cause a decrease in testosterone levels.

•     Cocaine and heroin, taken together, will make it harder for a woman to conceive and she is more likely to have a miscarriage, a stillbirth or a baby born with a malformation.

Medicines

If you or your partner are taking medication while you are trying to conceive you should speak to your doctor about which drugs are medically essential and which are not. Some drugs have a direct effect on fertility and you do need to discuss this with your GP.

Many drugs can affect not only the man’s sperm but also his ejaculatory function and libido. Some medicines may even cause impotence. These drugs can include sulphasalazine (used to treat irritable bowel), nitrofurantoin, tetracycline, cimetidine, ketoconazole, tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and propranol.

In addition, medication given for conditions like gout or high blood pressure can interfere with fertility. And non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (often used for arthritis) can stop ovulation.

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Smoking will do in more than internal organs. It takes a pretty heavy hit on health-care budgets, too. A Dutch study figured that health-care costs for smokers can be 40 percent higher than for nonsmokers. So we’d all save a bundle if everybody would just quit smoking, right?

In fact, total health-care costs would actually rise in a smokeless society. The reason is obvious: More people would be living longer to run up medical bills in other ways.

But that’s not going to happen any time soon. If you’re a smoker, you know why: It’s hard to quit. It should never be told to a smoker that quitting is easy, says Dr. Thomas Glynn of the American Cancer Society. “But nobody ever said that addiction can’t be beat,” he says. Here’s how.

Really mean it. When it comes to losing the cigarette habit, the road to failure is paved with halfhearted resolve. “Motivation is the absolute determinant,” Dr. Glynn says. “Nothing will work unless you woke up that morning and said to yourself, ‘This is it. I’m not smoking anymore.’”

Take a walk. Exercise can give you that extra motivational boost and make you feel better while you’re trying to quit smoking. “Do something really easy, particularly if you haven’t been exercising,” Dr. Glynn says. “Take a daily 15-minute walk at a time when you would ordinarily want a cigarette, like in the morning after you’ve had coffee.”

Delay the diet. You really do tend to gain weight as you try to stop smoking, Dr. Glynn says. But his advice is to concentrate on the immediate challenge, which is kicking butts. “A diet is a tough thing to handle at the same time you’re quitting smoking,” Dr. Glynn says. “Wait until you’re safely past the first two or three months of not smoking.

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Our refined, fast-food diet also leaves us lacking in a couple of essential minerals, says Dr. Tucker-magnesium and calcium. Though it doesn’t get a whole lot of press, magnesium has been linked to protection from diabetes, arteriosclerosis, hypertension, some headaches, and osteoporosis (yes, bone loss is a man’s problem, too). Yet Americans routinely consume less than the 400 milligrams (the Daily Value) they should each day. And the National Academy of Science’s calcium intake recommendations-1,000 milligrams a day for men ages 25 to 65-is a dosage so high that few get enough without supplementation, Dr. Tucker says. As you know, calcium prevents bone loss in your later years, and men lose a significant amount of bone density, too, she says. Taking a multivitamin with 100 milligrams of magnesium and 200 milligrams of calcium (provided you’re getting about 800 milligrams from three to four servings of low-fat dairy foods a day) is smart insurance, she says. However, people with heart or kidney problems should not take supplemental magnesium.

Finally, surveys show that zinc may be the mineral most lacking in our diets. That’s a serious omission since zinc not only helps keep your immune system strong so that you can fight infections and heal wounds but also is also a main component of your manhood. Zinc helps you produce sperm and maintain healthy semen and testosterone levels. Since you can lose up to 5 milligrams-one-third of the 15-milligram Daily Value-of this sexy mineral with each ejaculation, make sure that you eat enough turkey, oysters, lean beef, or fortified cereals to get what you need each day. Or take a multivitamin/mineral supplement that contains 15 milligrams of zinc. Just don’t supplement above that level, according to Dr. Kawachi, or you risk throwing off your body’s balance of other important minerals, especially copper, and can lower the body’s beneficial high-density lipoprotein cholesterol.

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A similar language problem exists with bulimia. The word comes from the Greek meaning “ox hunger”- certainly a vivid image. Before the 1980s, doctors used the term bulimia exclusively to mean a disorder of overeating. But, like anorexia, the word refers only to a particular symptom: in this case, binge eating. It doesn’t include the flip side of the binge, the purge. The term is thus too narrow to describe the many different eating patterns that characterize the disorder.

For example, all bulimics eat large amounts of food, but there is a wide variation in weight. Some patients are exclusively bulimic, but roughly half of all anorexics also binge and purge. Their starving bodies scream for food; once they yield, they may consume an enormous amount at one sitting. To keep their weight down, these people desperately try to get rid of the meal. Still other bulimics were once self-starvers; they have returned to their normal weight but continue to binge and purge. It’s important to recognize these variations, because they each call for a somewhat different treatment.

In the mid-1970s someone coined the term bulimarexia (“hunger/starvation”) to describe the condition in which a purge follows a binge. Not a particularly graceful word, bulimarexia never caught on. British experts chose to use bulimia nervosa. As with anorexia nervosa, the term distinguishes the symptom from the syndrome and shows that the disorder has both psychological and physical elements.

Only in the late 1980s did doctors in this country accept bulimia nervosa as the best name.

If this seems a bit confusing, take heart-even medical professionals are sometimes bewildered by the subtleties of these terms. I’ve mentioned the debate to show how our perceptions of eating disorders change as we learn more about them.

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1. Do you binge often?

2. Do you feel your eating behavior is out of control?

3. Do you purge through vomiting, or using laxatives or enemas?

4. Do others in your household complain that you spend too much time in the bathroom?

5. Do you exercise excessively or use diet pills?

6. Are you constantly dieting or weighing yourself?

7. Are you preoccupied with thoughts of food or calories?

8. Do you plan binges or hoard food in anticipation of a binge?

9. Do you eat in secret or mislead others about your food intake? (For example, do you order a

salad while eating out, but go on a binge once you are home and alone?)

10. Do you make excuses for the quantity of food you are buying-for example, telling the person

behind you at the checkout stand that “company is coming”?

11. Do you spend large amounts of money on food?

12. Have you ever shoplifted food?

13. Are you very angry with yourself when you feel you have eaten too much, even if it is just an

extra nibble?

14. Does feeling good about yourself depend on your ability to exert total control over eating or

weight?

15. Do you isolate yourself from others if you feel a few pounds overweight?

16. Do you depend a great deal on others for approval?

17. Do you have difficulty asserting yourself even if you know you are right?

18. Are you excessively moody?

19. Are you excessively fatigued?

20. Have you noticed puffiness in your face or swelling in your neck glands?

21. Do you have trouble with your teeth, such as pain or discoloring?

22. Have people around you mentioned they have noticed unusual or offensive odors?

23. Has your weight fluctuated a lot recently?

In this inventory there is no arbitrary number of “yes” answers that would indicate the presence of an eating disorder. Instead, you can use it to raise your awareness about the possibility of serious problems. If there is reason for concern, I urge you to see your doctor for a complete evaluation. Don’t put it off. The longer an eating disorder persists, the worse it gets.

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Julie Portner has a special fondness for french fries, chocolate, and cookies. But she knows that eating too much of these foods isn’t good for her figure. So when she’s tempted to overindulge, she reminds herself about her wardrobe. In an instant, the temptation passes.

It was her wardrobe that first gave Julie the incentive to slim down. “Winter was coming on, and none of my winter clothes fit me anymore,” explains the 38-year-old Ra’anana, Israel, resident. “I wouldn’t be able to wing it as I had done through the summer by wearing loose-fitting shirts and elastic-waist shorts. But I wasn’t about to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe, two sizes larger.”

At 5 foot 2 and 138 pounds, Julie wasn’t obese, but she wasn’t happy with how she looked or felt, either. “Some people asked if I was pregnant, because the weight came on so fast—about 17 pounds in 5 months,” she says. “I was heavy and unfit, and I felt unattractive.”

Determined to begin losing the extra weight before winter arrived, Julie signed up for Weight Watchers in the fall of 1996. The program taught Julie how to make healthy food choices and control her portion sizes. It also persuaded her to exercise, inspiring her to walk for 40 minutes on an almost daily basis.

But what really made a difference, she says, was the program’s monthly weigh-ins. “They gave me incentive to continue eating healthfully and exercising regularly,” she explains.

Within 6 months, Julie lost 20 pounds. She looked trimmer, and she felt better. But the real payoff came when her too-small winter clothes fit comfortably again. “Actually, I reached my goal weight in April 1997, after winter was over,” she says. “I made do that season by covering buttons and zippers that wouldn’t close with baggy tops and sweaters. It was just good to know that my wardrobe would fit the next time that winter came around.”

In the years since she shed the extra pounds, Julie has maintained her weight at 118 pounds. She continues to eat healthfully and exercise regularly, though occasionally she finds herself tempted by french fries, chocolate, or cookies. In those situations, she reminds herself about how hard she worked to slim down and how nicely her wardrobe fits. Usually, that’s enough to convince her to walk away.

“I’ve reached a point where my desire to continue fitting into my clothing is stronger than my desire to overeat,” she says.

WINNING ACTION

Let your clothes help you overcome a craving. You spy a pint-size container of your favorite premium ice cream, and you feel your willpower weakening. What to do? Try conjuring an image of your favorite dress or pair of jeans. Think about how nicely it fits and how good it makes you look, or about how close you’ve come to being able to wear the garment after years of hanging it in the back of your closet. Now, is that ice cream worth it? Probably not.

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When thoughts of food draw Cynthia Herrmann toward the fridge, she distracts herself by grabbing a magazine or newspaper and heading for the couch. This little trick has helped her ride out many a craving—and get rid of 92 unwanted pounds.

Cynthia, of Laurel, Maryland, didn’t always have such control over her cravings. They’re one reason why her weight went over 200 pounds—not once, but three times. The third time came as Cynthia neared her 40th birthday in 1991. “I had been losing and regaining ever since I was a teenager,” she says. “Finally, I just got tired of having to wear size-22′/2 dresses. I swore that I would lose the weight and keep it off.”

At 232 pounds, Cynthia figured that she had her work cut out for her. At first, she tried modifying her diet on her own. “I ate more fiber-rich foods, especially fruits and vegetables, because I knew they would fill me up faster,” she says. “I chose lean meats and low-fat dairy products, and I switched to healthier cooking methods.”

The weight came off slowly but steadily, and within 4 years,

Cynthia plateaued at 170 pounds. At that point, she decided to join Weight Watchers, where she learned to keep a food journal to monitor her eating habits. “Through the journal, I realized that I had a tendency to eat past the point of fullness,” she says. Within 8 months, 30 pounds melted away.

Finally at her goal weight of 140 pounds, Cynthia set aside her J food journal—and the pounds started creeping back. “I wasn’t eating well consistently, and I started giving in to cravings again,” she says. “I was better off when I wrote everything down.”

But Cynthia didn’t want to resume journaling. As much as it had helped her, it came to serve as a reminder of her missteps and mistakes. Discouraged, she searched for an alternative to rein in her cravings.

Cynthia believed that by distracting her attention at the first sign of a craving, she could buy time until she determined whether she was experiencing genuine physical hunger or emotion-based “head hunger.” That’s when she hit upon the idea of picking up a magazine or newspaper and forcing herself to read for 15 minutes. If she still felt hungry when she was done reading, she would know that her body was demanding food, and she’d eat. Often, though, she’d get so absorbed by what she was reading that 30 minutes would fly by—and when she was done, her craving was gone.

Picking up a newspaper or the latest issue of a favorite magazine when she feels hungry has helped Cynthia, now 48, maintain her 140-pound figure for almost 4 years. “Taking the time to distinguish between physical and emotional hunger has made all the difference,” she says. “I’ve learned to pay closer attention to why I want to eat and, when necessary, to address the real issue—be it stress or boredom or something else.”

WINNING ACTION

Pick up a juicy magazine instead of a juicy meal. When hunger js more mental than physical, divert your brain with a tempting book or magazine. Many times, I find that I’m just looking for a way to treat myself after a long day. I like to keep issues of fun magazines—Vogue, Vanity Fair, or People—around to indulge myself. If you’re still hungry after 15 minutes of reading, chances are, it’s true hunger and you should eat.

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