4. Reduce Your Intake of Saturated Fats

To maintain good health it is important to eat some fat in our diets. The kind of fat we eat is of great importance herein.

There are two kinds of fat:

• Saturated fat - Having too much saturated fat can increase your blood cholesterol, increasing the likelihood of developing heart disease
• Unsaturated fat - Eating unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat reduces your blood cholesterol

For a healthy diet, it is crucial to reduce the amount of food you eat that is high in saturated fat, like butter, meat, pasties, pies, biscuits, cakes and pastries. Alternatively, try to eat foods rich in unsaturated fat like vegetable oils (including olive oil, sunflower and rapeseed), oily fish, nuts and seeds and avocados.

Foods high in saturated fat

Try to eat these sorts of foods less often or in small amounts:

• meat pies
• meat with visible fat
• sausages
• butter and lard
• hard cheese
• cakes
• biscuits
• pastries
• cream, crème fraiche and soured cream
• coconut oil, palm oil and coconut cream

How Do You Work Out The Fat Content of Food?

Each food has a label showing the fat content of the food. Usually the label states the number of grams (g) of fat per 100g of that food.

Certain foods also provide a figure for saturated fat content, or 'saturates'.

This quick guide will help you to work out whether a food is high or low in fat.

High Fat Content is greater than 20g fat per 100g

Low Fat Content is 3g fat or less per 100g

Should the fat content be between these figures then that is a medium fat level.

High Saturated Fat Content is greater than 5g saturates per 100g

Low Saturated Fat Content is 1.5g saturates or less per 100g

Should the amount of saturates per 100g be between these figures, then that is a medium level of saturated fat.

You need to bear in mind that how much of a particular food you eat affects the amount of fat you will consume.

Attempt to make low fat food choices and reduce your intake of high fat foods.

People who follow the Mediterranean diet eat less saturated fat.
More than half of the fat calories in a Mediterranean diet come from monounsaturated fats (mainly from olive oil). Monounsaturated fat doesn't raise blood cholesterol levels the way saturated fat does.

Why saturated fat is bad for you

Fat is an essential part of the diet, but lots of people eat more fat than they need or is good for them.

In particular, saturated fats are dangerous because they raise 'bad' cholesterol and can block up the arteries to the heart.

Having too much harmful cholesterol in the blood increase the risk of coronary heart disease - the biggest killer in many countries.

What is 'good' and 'bad' fat?

We all need to eat fat as part of a healthy diet. 'Good' fats include omega-3 fatty acids, found particularly in oily fish such as herring, mackerel, sardines, tuna, salmon and swordfish, and omega-6 fats found in olives, nuts, seeds and seed oils, and many vegetables and grains.
These help keep our arteries healthy and raise levels of beneficial HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol.

'Bad' fats are saturated fats - hard fats found mainly in animal products such as red meat, butter and full-fat cheeses; and 'trans-fats' (fats that have been solidified by the process of hydrogenation) found in processed foods such as many margarines, biscuits, cakes and pies.
These raise blood levels of harmful LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol.

How much is too much?

For adults no more than 11% of our energy should come from saturated fat, which means that the average man should have no more than 30g a day and the average woman no more than 20g a day.

Similarly, children aged 5-10 should eat no more than 20g of saturated fat per day.

There is no maximum recommended level for infants - they naturally need more fat in their diet than adults because they are growing. But children aged two and above can be given semi-skimmed or 1% fat milk rather than full-fat.

What harm can too much fat do?

High levels of fat in the diet can lead to obesity, which carries its own health risks. But high levels of saturated fat in the diet is a known risk factor for heart and circulatory diseases, such as coronary heart disease, heart attacks, angina and stroke.

Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death in the UK and in 2006 was responsible for around one in three premature deaths.