There are three primary reasons why we want to cut the fat when we have diabetes. One of the first reasons is the calorie value of fat. Fat is extremely calorie dense, but it provides no volume. And so it's really easy to get in a lot of calories when we take in fat. And let me give you an example. Let's take this half a cup of peas here. This is about seventy to eighty calories. Now, if you add one tablespoon of butter to those peas, it will be a hundred and seventy calories. If you take a half a cup of rice, it's seventy to eighty calories, add one tablespoon of butter, it's a hundred and seventy calories. So any time you add fat to food, you double and triple the calories without changing the volume. So by cutting the fat you're automatically going to cut calories without necessarily changing how much you're eating. Now, for example, let's say someone ate something that was very high in fat and high in sugar, like chocolate candy, Hershey's kisses, that tiny small volume of food may not seem like much but from a calorie perspective it's quite a bit. And if you compare it to something that's really low in calories like broccoli, there's quite a difference. Ten Hershey's kisses is exactly the same number of calories as five cups of broccoli. So, both fat and sugars have that effect of increasing calories while shrinking the volume. So that's the one key thing about fat, and one of the reasons why we want to restrict fat. The second is the type of fat. The fat that is solid at room temperature is what we call saturated fat. Now saturated fat increases the cholesterol that tends to cling to the artery wall, which we call the bad cholesterol, or the LDL cholesterol. Most of the foods in the American diet are very rich in saturated fat. Fat that's in cheese, in any of your meats, what we call hydrogenated fats in margarine, partially hydrogenated fats in many of the baked goods, those kind of fats raise our cholesterol, so when we cut our total fat, we often end up cutting the saturated fat as well. And the third reason why we want to cut the fat is because the fat in the meal creates more insulin resistance. The body is actually less responsive to insulin when there is a high fat meal. And in addition, there is an effect on what we call endothelial function. The blood vessel is less likely to be able to open and close naturally and tends to stay stiffer when there is fat in the meal.
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