The Types Of Fats
There are 4 main categories of fats. They are trans, saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. These fancy names had no meaning to me until I fully understood how these fats are structured at the molecular level. Now they make sense to me and they will to you too.

Trans Fats
Please bear with me for a moment as I describe the chemical make up of fats. Fat molecules essentially consist of carbon atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms. When every carbon atom in a fat is attached to two hydrogen atoms, that carbon atom is said to be saturated with hydrogen atoms. This is where the term "saturated fat" comes from. This is a kind of fat we are going to talk about next.

Trans fats are useless when it comes to fueling your body and are very acid. You want to stay away from them. Trans fats are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil in order to turn it from a liquid into a solid at room temperature so that you can use it as a spread like margarine.

This process is referred to as "hydrogenation" because you are actually adding extra hydrogen to the fat. These trans fats are in effect super saturated with hydrogen. Keep this in mind when we later discuss the acid and alkaline effect of fats.

Another reason you want to stay away from trans fats is because when they do this hydrogenation process, the changed structure of the fat makes it completely useless to the body as a food. That's because this new structure is very difficult for your body to break down.

Another way that trans fats can be created is when you heat monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats to a high temperature when you cook with these fats. Unfortunately, this almost always occurs when you fry your food or overheat your food that has these normally good fats in it.

So here's what you want to do to get around this problem. Cook your food, then add your monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats to your food AFTERWARDS. This prevents the good fat from being transformed into the bad trans fat.

When it comes to shopping for foods and avoiding trans fats that are in those foods, avoid processed foods that have anything on the list of ingredients that says, "vegetable shortening" or "partially hydrogenated". Unfortunately, these two ingredients appear in a lot of foods.

Saturated fats
Again, the reason they are called saturated fats is because the carbon atoms in the chain are "saturated" with two hydrogen atoms. A good way to remember saturated fats is that almost all of them are solid at room temperature. Saturated fats aren't necessarily bad. It depends on whether or not they are animal or plant based and whether or not they have been heated during cooking and turned into trans fats.

There are two reasons you want to stay away from animal based saturated fats. The first reason is because of the long chained nature of the way animal based saturated fats are structured.

What this means is that animal based saturated fats are made up of long chains of carbon atoms and these chains are hard to break down and therefore hard for the body to use.

The second reason you want to stay away from these kinds of fats has to do with the whole acid/alkaline issue we talked about in the last issue. Specifically, the more a substance is saturated with hydrogen, the higher a positive charge it has. And the more positive a charge a substance has, the more acidic it tends to be.

So in order to make sure your body stays alkaline, you need to be taking in mostly negatively charged (alkaline) foods. This includes fats. At the very least you want fats that have as low a positive charge as possible. A neutral or negative charge would be better.

In contrast to animal based saturated fats, plant based saturated fats can be broken down and used more easily by your body. This is because a lot of plant based saturated fats are medium and short carbon chained in structure.

Examples of animal based saturated fats that you want to stay away from or at least reduce can be found in eggs, meat, poultry and milk products. The kinds of plant based saturated fats that are ok are safflower, palm and coconut oils.

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