There are many rumors and myths about saturated fatty acids. Many demonize them vehemently. Whether saturated fatty acids are friend or foe in your diet, you can find out here.
Saturated Fatty Acids: Introduction
Fats and thus fatty acids generally have a very bad image in Germany. Fat-reduced food is available on every supermarket shelf. Basically, you can distinguish between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. In this article, we take care of the evaluation of saturated fatty acids and show you how you can incorporate them into your diet.
Saturated fatty acids: Difference to unsaturated fatty acids
Fatty acids are generally hydrocarbon chains of varying lengths. The number of double bonds is decisive for the classification into saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Saturated fatty acids contain no double bonds at all, while simply insatiated fatty acids contain one and several double bonds.
In contrast to the unsaturated fatty acids our body can produce saturated fatty acids independently. They are thus not essential for the food intake.
Saturated fatty acids: Functions
Saturated fatty acids primarily provide our body with energy. However, individual fatty acids also have special tasks:
Palmitic acid regulates the hormone metabolism
Butyric acid controls the distribution of genetic data
Palmitic and myristic acid take care of the immune metabolism
Saturated fatty acids: need
Recommendations for certain nutritional building blocks are often subjective and difficult to accept as the one truth. According to the German Society for Nutrition (DGE), you should consume 7 to 10 percent of your food through saturated fatty acids.
Most people consume significantly more saturated fatty acids every day, sometimes up to twice the amount on average. So you can definitely take it from this article that you should not completely eliminate saturated fats from your diet, but you should not overdo it in any way, as you cannot expect any health benefits from increased consumption.
Saturated fatty acids: good or bad
Saturated fatty acids are a factor in triglycerides (blood fats) and an increase in harmful LDL cholesterol. These influences favour cardiovascular diseases. It remains however also to be stated that nearly all saturated fatty acids (except Palmitinsäure) increase both the positive and the negative Cholesterin (HDL vs. LDL), which do not affect the Cholesterinspiegel as such thus at all.
Newer studies showed however that the effect of saturated fatty acids can fail differently. While medium-chain saturated fatty acids (e.g. coconut fat or milk fat) affect the Cholesterinspiegel negatively, long-chain fatty acids (e.g. Palmitinsäure) do not have such a harmful effect. This is probably due to the fact that for the longer chains more bile acid and enzymes must be used for digestion.
On the other hand, medium-chain fatty acids can be used to produce energy faster. This is not insignificant for people with problems in fat digestion. In summary, it can be said that opinions on saturated fatty acids are quite ambivalent, but they should neither be completely demonized nor should they be the main component of your diet.
Saturated fatty acids: In which foods are they increasingly contained?
Saturated fatty acids are mainly found in animal food, but also occasionally in vegetable fats such as coconut fat, palm oil or cocoa butter. You can tell from the hardness of fat whether it contains rather saturated or unsaturated fatty acids. The harder a fat is, the more saturated fatty acids it contains.
Fatty meat and sausage
Butter
Baked goods
Chocolate and sweets
Cream
Coconut and palm oil
Saturated fatty acids: 2 practical tips for nutrition
Analyzing food: Finished products in particular usually contain far too much salt, sugar and fat. The fat information is usually divided into saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Whereby with unsaturated fatty acids even still the division into simply and several times insatiated is made. As an orientation you can stick to the maximum of 10 percent of saturated fatty acids in your daily diet.
Animal fats by vegetable fats replace: In particular with the oils an important nourishing conversion can be made. Instead of setting on butter (lard), use rather rapeseed oil or other vegetable oils. For frying you can take also spreading fats with at least 70 per cent spreading fat, since many unsaturated fatty acids are here many.
You can find out what a low cholesterol diet looks like here. And we show you how you can easily create a diet plan. We also describe what macronutrients are the cornerstones of nutrition.