Saturated Fats Are Necessary for Good Health
Saturated Fats Help Us To Absorb Vitamins
 

Many of us, doctors and laypeople alike, were taught that red meat and fat, and especially saturated fats, are to be avoided.  We still hear that they cause all sorts of problems, including high cholesterol, heart disease and weight gain.  However, if you carefully study the research, you will see that it shows the opposite to be true.  Saturated fat is a vital nutrient and is necessary for good health. 

In order for your body to properly use fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A, you need to have the fat in your foods.  Calcium and other minerals, too, need fats as well as fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A for proper absorption.  So it's important to use full-fat dairy products and put butter and cream on your calcium-rich leafy green and other vegetables and eat salad with oil-based dressings.  If you eat this way, you will increase your absorption of the vitamins and minerals contained in those salads and other vegetables.

While we Americans have been lowering the amount of fat in our diets, especially saturated fats like animal meats, butter, lard, coconut oil and full-fat dairy products, not only have obesity rates skyrocketed, like previously discussed, but heart disease rates have also increased.  A wealth of research points to vegetable oils, sugar, especially high-fructose corn syrup, and refined grains as a major cause of obesity, and to trans-fats, and vegetable oils and shortening as a major cause of heart disease.

According to Dr. Ron Rosedale, when you eat lots of carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates like sugar and white flour products, your body converts them to sugar and then burns that sugar instead of burning fat.  Saturated fats act as a carrier for the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K.  When the fat is removed from foods in our diet, many of these vitamins are also removed, and our absorption of these vitamins also goes way down.

Saturated fats protect the liver from alcohol, drugs and other toxins.  Saturated fats also support the immune system, which helps keep you from getting sick. Saturated fats are needed for correct bone development and in order to prevent osteoporosis.  A high level of fat in the diet needs to be saturated in order for the body to properly utilize calcium.  This means that a low-fat diet with plenty of calcium and/or calcium supplements is not necessarily going to prevent osteoporosis, and this is seen today in the high rates of osteoporosis.
 

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