What Happens if You Have Too Much or Too Little Fat in Your Diet?
While fat has often been dubbed as a dietary nemesis, it’s important to know that you need some fat in your diet for the body to perform a wide range of functions, including energy storage, supporting cell growth, forming hormones, aiding wound healing, helping to absorb nutrients, and helping to protect vital organs. Getting enough fat in the diet helps ensure that these functions perform normally. While it’s important to get enough of the right kinds of fat, getting too much of the wrong kinds of fats can wreak havoc with your health.
Too Much Dietary Fat. The recommended dietary fat intake is between 20% to 35% of calories, but the average intake in the US is just above the maximum recommended intake—36.1% for women and 35.6% for men. Following a popular keto-type diet generally calls for as much as 80% calories from fat, which generally results in weight loss, but consuming that much fat can be unhealthy. According to the University of Chicago Medicine, consuming the amount of fat recommended for keto diets can cause kidney stones, constipation, nutrient deficiencies, and increased risk of heart disease. A super high-fat diet is especially unsafe for those with any conditions involving their pancreas, liver, thyroid, or gallbladder.
“A very high-fat diet also makes it difficult to meet recommended fiber goals,” says Julie Stefanski MEd, RDN, CSSD, LDN, CDCES, FAND, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics. In addition, she says, “Many meals Americans consume contain so much fat that it can wreak havoc on the fat digestion process, leading to diarrhea, abdominal pain, gallbladder issues, and acid reflux.”
Not All Fats Are the Same. Regardless of the amount of fat in your diet, or your health status, not all fats are created equal. For example, getting too much of manufactured trans fats can be especially harmful. The major dietary sources of trans fats in the diet are cakes, cookies, crackers, animal products, margarine, fried potatoes, potato chips, popcorn, and shortening. Despite being widespread in the diet, trans fats are not required by the body. According to the American Heart Association, trans fats in the diet can increase bad (LDL) cholesterol levels and lower good (HDL) cholesterol levels, increasing your risk of developing heart disease and stroke. Research has also suggested that trans fats are linked to colon cancer and weight gain—aside from any weight gain resulting from excess fat calories. A high trans-fat diet has also been associated with a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Most experts have recommended eliminating trans fats from your diet, but if that’s not possible, keeping them to a minimum is healthy advice. The current recommendation is to keep trans fats to less than 1% of total energy intake, which translates to less than 2.2 g/day for a 2,000-calorie diet.
The same caveat applies to saturated fats—eating a diet high in saturated fats has been linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease. Like trans fats, too much saturated fat can cause cholesterol to build up in your arteries, raising your LDL cholesterol. Saturated fats have also been linked to inflammation, which is the trigger for a host of health conditions. Most saturated fats in the diet come from beef, lamb, pork, poultry, beef fat (tallow), lard and cream, butter, cheese, ice cream, coconut, palm oil, palm kernel oil, and some baked and fried foods. Recommendations for saturated fat intake range from less than 6% of calories to no more than 10% of calories. The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated intake to no more than 6% of your total calories. If you need 2,000 calories a day, that lower limit translates to no more than 120 of those calories or 13 grams of fat from saturated fat.
Too Little Dietary Fat. Generally speaking, getting too little fat in the diet occurs far less often than getting too much. But following an extremely low-fat or fat-free diet in an effort to lose weight or reduce cardiovascular disease can cause several other health problems. That’s because healthy fats contain the essential fatty acids (EFAs), omega-3 fatty acids (fatty fish, flax, walnuts, canola oil) and omega-6 fatty acids (soybean, corn, and safflower oils; fish, eggs, walnuts, almonds, avocado), which the body is able to manufacture only in small amounts. Both require dietary sources. A low intake of fats and oils (less than amount corresponding to 20% of daily calorie intake) increases the risk of inadequate intakes of vitamin E and of EFAs and may contribute to unfavorable changes in HDL and triglycerides. Moreover, an extremely low-fat diet provides inadequate EFAs that are needed for cell growth, and skin and brain health.
“Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K can be challenging to come by when fat is avoided,” says dietitian Stefanski, “which can result in in low levels of vitamins that are typically absorbed more efficiently when dietary fat is present.”
Bottom Line. It’s easy to consume too much fat and difficult to eliminate all fat, but neither is good for your health. Stick with the current recommendation of 20% to 35% of calories, focusing on healthy fats for maintaining good health.
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