photo by jonny2love
A reader commented on one of my posts with an important question concerning saturated fats. It’s a topic that seems to come up often when discussing what’s lacking in a vegan diet. So, I thought this was a good question to post in order to provide some clarity on the issue:
Question: what do you do about your body’s need for saturated fats (more likely found in meat/dairy products)? While you need very little, if you don’t eat any, your body takes it from other sources within your body – namely, your brain…in which saturated fat makes up about 30+ percent of your brain!
Response: Great question! Believe it or not, vegan diets are not devoid of saturated fat. Oils like extra virgin olive oil, palm oil, and coconut oil all contain saturated fat. The thing vegans do not get in their diet is cholesterol, since that is only found in animal products. However, from what I’ve read, we do not need this cholesterol to be healthy. That being said, getting a lot of hydrogenated oil can actually cause the liver to make too much of its own cholesterol. But overall, vegans tend to have much better cholesterol levels than non-vegans.
sources: http://www.vegfamily.com/dietician/0904a.htm, http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_you_need_saturated_fat
Tracy Says:
Really interesting point. Yeah, cholesterol is NOT determined by how much cholesterol is in your diet. It’s determined by weight, genetics and the very important, often overlooked factor: exercise (African people with nomadic lifestyles have basically perfect cholesterol levels – may also be helped by their diet). To a certain extent, cholesterol can be helped by less simple sugars and more grains, fruits, fibers. But how much that helps is dependent on the person.
August 11th, 2010 at 10:49 pm