Healthy Food Choices for Saturated Fats

Most meat products contain saturated fats, which can raise your risk to heart disease. Learn some healthy tips on avoiding saturated fats in this video clip.

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Most meat products contain saturated fats
Saturated fats can increase chances of heart disease
Remove fat & skin from meat

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Alice Merritt is currently the Campus Dietitian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has a masters degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public health with a concentration on nutrition. Alice has worked as a registered dietician for four years, and believes that helping people reach their nutritional goals will lead to a long and healthy life.

ALICE MERRITT: Now I'm going to talk to you about saturated fats. There's actually several different kinds of fats. You have your unsaturated fats, which are typically heart-healthy fat, which are like olive oil and canola oil. And then you have other fats like saturated fats, which are found in food such as meats, especially any animal product, fatty cuts of meats such as bacon, sausage, butter, lard, high fat dairy products, whole milk, and creams. And saturated fats have actually been linked to increased risk of heart disease. So these are things that you really want to limit in your diet. Ways that you can cut down on saturated fat is choosing your leaner sources of meat, chicken, turkey, fish, and trimming away any visible fat or skin that may be on the meat. You can also look for leaner sources of dairy products. Lower fat, fat free or 1% milk is also a good way to lower your saturated fat. Important things to remember about saturated fat, it is linked to heart disease. So you want to make sure you watch that and keep it as low as possible. Ways to do that, choose leaner meats; remove any skin or fat before cooking. When you're sauteing vegetables or cooking things in a skillet, use things like olive oil and canola oil or the spray to reduce the amount of fats. You can also use grilling instead of frying things like vegetables or frying meats. All of these things are good ways to decrease your saturated fat and have better health.

Healthy Food Choices for Saturated Fats Video

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