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Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten recalls how much fat a woman should consume when trying to reverse heart disease.
Deborah Kesten:
In the general literature, recommendations by public health professionals, the recommendation for prevention is to consume about 20% calories from fat and that means taking in two to four, if ten percent is one to two tablespoons, that means, well okay, let’s add another tablespoon or two during the day throughout our food and meal of fat and you are up to about 20%.
If you flip-flop this thinking and now, which is how Americans eat, and instead of eating mostly plant-based food and adding a little oil or fat to that, you flip-flop it and you start with a diet that’s mostly chicken and meat and dairy and fish with some lettuce and tomato sometimes, so you are eating higher fat foods now. You are on the animal-based level now, okay.
You start with the fat there, which is naturally higher in fat because it’s animal-based, just naturally higher in fat than plant-based food, and you take the skin off the chicken and you start having low-fat yogurt, let’s say, and low-fat this, low-fat that, which is how Americans perceive healthful eating, you are about 30% calories from fat.
And then what most people are doing, which leads to the heart disease, contributes to heart disease, is they are eating 40% or more calories from fat which is lots of animal-based foods that’s fried and it’s the pepperoni and it’s the Chicken McNuggets and it’s not having the skin off the chicken and it’s the French fried potatoes. That’s what 40% and higher calories from fat means.
So it’s really impossible to eat a non-fat diet, and the key concept is you want to eat the kinds of fats naturally occurring in the food that’s optimal, and those are the central fatty acids, the good fats, the omega-3s, the omega-6s, omega-9s, especially omega-3s.
About Deborah Kesten, M.P.H.:
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition and lifestyle researcher and educator, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She was the nutritionist on Dr. Dean Ornish’s first clinical trial for reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, and Director of Nutrition on similar research at cardiovascular clinics in Europe. More recently, she has created the pioneering Enlightened Diet, a “whole person” optimal eating and weight loss program, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. With more than 200 published health articles, she is the award-winning author of The Enlightened Diet, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul and The Healing Secrets of Food, a comprehensive, evidence-based nutrition program about the power of food to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.
Visit Deborah Kesten at her website