People often tell me that they feel like the underlying cause of their back pain is them being overweight and inflamed. In this case contrary to popular belief fat is not your enemy. Fat is the preferred energy source to the body. The lean human body is 74% saturated fat and 26% protein by calories. Saturated fat is the core structural part of every cell. It is the preferred fuel for the cell energy station (the mitochondria). The human body stores energy from food for future use as saturated fat and saturated fat is a cleaner burning fuel than glucose because it’s not toxic at high doses. Our bodies are basically designed to run on saturated fat and monounsaturated fat.
Fat doesn’t make you fat. If this were true high fat diets like Atkins wouldn’t be superior to low fat diets for weight loss – which they are – and traditional people like the Inuit that get 90% of their calories from fat and the Masai who get 60-70% of their calories from fat would be fat – and they’re not. It’s over consumption of processed and refined carbohydrates and seed oils are the real causes of the obesity epidemic as well as a common cause of systemic inflammation.
So, if seed oils are bad what fats do we need? The fat pyramid demonstrates what fats your body need the most to least of, with the biggest requirement forming the base of the pyramid: