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Alpha Nutrition Program Fats & Oils
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Alpha Nutrition Food Choices Alpha Nutrition Food Exclusions |
High fat intake is a major cause disability and disease. Detailed consideration of optimal fatty intake is built into the Alpha Nutrition Program. The total amount of fat, the source and kind of fat are all considered. A frontier in nutrition programming is to achieve an optimal ratio of fatty acids in the diet. Making the best choices in food selection, food combining, the choice of meat, fish and vegetable oils all contribute to finding the optimal intake of fat. Here is an example of the ideas incorporated into the program: Vegetable Oils The fatty acids, linoleic acid and alpha linolenic acid, are essential nutrients. Arachidonic acid is sometimes considered essential but may be produced inside cells by the conversion of linoleic acid. Animal fats have been associated with several major diseases: atherosclerosis, which leads to heart attacks and strokes, cancers of the colon and breast, and obesity. Other solid fats - shortening, lard, and margarines are also not desirable. Typical North American and European diets contain up to 45% fat, an extravagant surplus. Fat is energy dense, supplying 9 Kcal/gram. Current recommendations for fat intake are shrinking progressively from 35% of total calories to below 20%. Our needs are supplied by 15-25 grams of fat per day or 1-2% of total calories for adults and 3% for infants. Fat intakes closer to actual need may be desirable, especially for those at risk of fat-related disease. The Alpha Nutrition Program goal is fat intake at 10-14 % of daily calories. The health benefits and risks of fat intake can be best understood by looking at the fatty acid content of the diet. The best vegetable oils are fresh perishable foods which contain desirable fatty acids in correct proportion. The best oils have unsaturated bonds between carbon atoms and are easily damaged by oxidation. The disadvantage of unsaturated carbon bonds is that they are easily oxidized, and oxidized FA tend to be unhealthy If vegetable oils are cooked at high temperature in the frying pan or deep fryer, oxidation occurs rapidly. This is the argument against fried foods. Slow fat oxidation underlies rancidity of fat. Vegetable oils, liquid at room temperature, tend to be unsaturated, and animal fats, solid at room temperature, tend to be saturated. Margarine is made from vegetable oils by saturating the carbon bonds chemically, and this procedure robs the oil of its metabolic advantages. Another variable of fatty acid structure is that the unsaturated bonds may have one of two forms; cis and trans. Only the cis form functions normally in us and is the natural form. The processing of vegetable oils to produce margarine and other cooking fats increases the trans forms of the same fatty acids, an undesirable result.
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