Healthy Food Choices for Good Fats

Good fats are those which aid the body and offer calories without increasing levels of unhealthy cholesterol. Try these tips for deciding on fat intake and good fats in this healthy shopping video.

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Some fats are worse than others
All fats should be minimized in diets
Saturated animal fats are less healthy
Liquid vegetable fats are healthier

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Michelle Cooper has been a registered dietician for more than 10 years. She currently works for the state of North Carolina for the New Hanover County School District in the Child Nutrition Department as the supervising registered dietician on staff. She specializes in child nutrition, child fitness and overall child health. She enjoys her job because it allows her to be a pivotal piece of child development.

MICHELLE COOPER: Next, we're going to talk about good fats. Fat is always considered bad; however, some fats are worse for you than others and some fats can actually have a protective benefit to us from getting cardiovascular disease. Fat is going to be either solid at room temperature or liquid at room temperature, and this depends on the degree of the saturation of the fat. Animal plants--I mean, animal fats are always solid at room temperature. Animal fats are things like butter, lard, shortening or shortenings from vegetables. The unsaturated fats are usually from vegetables and they are liquid at room temperature as you see behind me, sunflower oil, walnut oil, canola oil, sunflower oil. These are what we call the good fats. The ones that are liquid at room temperature. There is one vegetable fat or some vegetable fats that are actually solid at room temperature and those are your tropical oils like you see here, your coconut oil. However, we're going to stick to the ones that are liquid at room temperature. And the reason why these are considered good is because when we consume these fats, they actually help to lower the bad cholesterol on our body and raise the good cholesterol or the HDL cholesterol on our body. The saturated fats or the animal fats do the opposite. They actually raise your bad LDL cholesterol while lowering your good HDL cholesterol. So while it's a good idea to limit your intake of fat to no more than 30 percent of your calories per day. Remember to choose the ones that are liquid at room temperature or your vegetable oils over the ones that are solid at room temperature or your animal fats.

Healthy Food Choices for Good Fats Video

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