Diet - A Simple Bad-Fat Budget
A Simple Bad-Fat Budget
CAN YOU COUNT TO 10 (OR 20)?
You probably know someone who should be eating less bad fat.
Most of us think we are doing pretty well ourselves, especially if we have cut back on fried and greasy foods. Yet, without continuous con- scious effort, the grams of fat we eat everyday add up like taxes or the numbers on a gas pump.
People have no idea how much bad fat they are eating. Even though we can avoid eating too much obvious fat, bad fat hides in many food products.
Fat is an essential part of our diet. We need some fats, but not much-certainly not anywhere near the amount most people in our culture eat every day.
“So,” you are thinking, “you’re going to give me another compli- cated formula to figure how much fat I can have based on the calories I eat.”
Wrong!
Even though the official recommendations are not as complicated as they may first seem, monitoring and calculating fat intake that way is a tedious nuisance. Most people just don’t do it.
We developed an incredibly easy way to accomplish what the complicated formulas try to do. As we explained in an article in a prominent medical journal,1 “It seems to us that for simplicity, consistency and better compliance, there should be a specific limit on the number of grams of saturated fat to be eaten each day.”
Keeping track of a daily limit or budget of bad fat is so easy that anyone who can count to 20 can do it. If you are in a high-risk group, you can still follow our plan, except you only need to count to 10.
It’s that simple.
All you need to do is put yourself on a budget-a bad-fat budget.
Bad fat means a total of saturated fat and trans-fatty acids which we will talk more about later.
How much bad fat are we talking about? If you are in a high-risk group as we are or already have coronary-artery disease, peripheral vascular disease, an aneurysm or have had heart surgery, your budget is 10 grams of bad fat a day-no higher! If you’re not in a high-risk group, your budget is 20 grams of bad fat a day. Don’t be like most North Americans who currently eat 40 to 50 grams of bad fat per day.
Just count the grams of bad fat you eat during a day. Quit when you’ve hit your limit!
There are some exceptions–but not many. A person doing heavy outdoor work in a Minnesota winter, for example, needs to consume more saturated fat on those days. Most of us will be much healthier on a rather simple daily budget of limited saturated fat.
Perhaps surprisingly, a 20-gram-per-day bad-fat budget fits the recommended needs of most people, including children over the tod- dler age. The major exception is that people at high risk should limit their bad-fat intake to 10 grams a day.
This doesn’t mean everyone must eat exactly the same thing. That’s not our plan. You have lots of choices. People with exactly the same amount of money to budget never spend it exactly like their neighbors. Some choose to splurge a large chunk of their money all at once and have little left for other things. Others spend their money more sparingly, spreading it out.
The same thing happens with bad-fat budgets. You can splurge sometimes–but when you do, if you are going to stick to your budget, it means putting limits on other things you eat. Of course, whether we’re talking about bank-account or bad-fat budgets, some people entirely blow them. There are consequences in both cases.
Budgeting bad fat really gives you many choices. Don’t even think of this plan as a “diet.” Because it isn’t. We don’t even like the word “diet.” You won’t have to follow a particular menu plan and we don’t expect you to eat exactly what we eat. In fact, each of our families has different favorite foods. Your family does too. We are going to help you figure out how to enjoy most of your favorite meals without as much bad fat as you’ve probably been feeding yourself and your family.
Putting yourself on a 10- or 20-gram budget of bad fat means taking charge and being in control-the same type of control it takes when you put yourself on a budget to make your money work more effectively. Many good foods contain little or no fat and there are wonderful ways to prepare tasty food without much bad fat. This includes many of your favorite recipes and dishes that can be modified to reduce the fat greatly. You and your family won’t feel deprived. This plan is not going to be the torture like each of us once thought it would be. You’ll find yourself enjoying some exciting foods and maybe even preparing them.
On the other hand, budgeting the fat you eat to stop fat plaques from forming in your coronary arteries, means not eating some things you may really like, if they are filled with bad fat. Look at butter: there are 7 grams of saturated fat in each tablespoon, so even small amounts can quickly blow your budget. Butter tastes better than the other spreads you have tried, but some spreads with little or no saturated fat taste pretty good.
When blowing a budget, it’s possible to consume as much as 24 grams of saturated fat in one meal by eating a greasy double hamburger with cheese, fries and a milkshake made with real ice cream. That’s as much bad fat as a half stick of butter! The next time you think about ordering one of these All-American meals, think what it would be like to eat 1/8 pound of butter! That’s a big bad-fat overload.
The good news is that you don’t have to give up all fast foods because of your new budget. In fact, we’ll explain how you can fix these things so they are not overloaded with fat. Such a meal won’t be fat-free, so you’ll still need to keep count. There are ways to keep enjoying those favorites-at home and even at some fast-food places.
After hearing how much fat is in a typical fast-food hamburger meal, you may wonder how much bad fat your children and teenagers are eating each day. It’s not too hard to guess that every day most kids are consuming a lot of bad fat. As you can imagine, many of their favorite fast foods are very unhealthy.
School lunches are loaded with fat! Most schools serve more foods with saturated fat today than ever before. This is happening for two reasons. One is the idea that to get students to eat school lunches, they must be offered everything from greasy burgers and fries to pizza with sausage. The other reason is that even before this idea caught on, and before anyone knew that bad fats were such a serious problem, government surpluses of subsidized dairy products such as butter, cheese, milk and ice cream were given to schools at little or no cost. Such programs were undoubtedly begun with good intentions, but now we know that the tons of bad fat being fed every day to school children will cause big health problems later on. Who knows how much bad fat the average child or teenager is consuming each day?
Most adults probably eat around 40 or 50 grams of bad fat in a day-some as much as 100 grams. That’s too much! Besides the long-range effects of eating all this bad fat, it causes us to not feel as good as we do when we eat a reasonable amount of fat.
A budget of 20 grams of bad fat a day for those who are not known to be at risk and a 10-gram-a-day budget for those who are at risk is going to mean some changes.
You choose.
The consequences of this choice are similar to the consequences of the choice to smoke or not to smoke. We hope you will choose not to smoke-and not to eat too much bad fat.
Limiting Your Saturated-Fat Intake
Our 10- and 20-gram budget numbers didn’t just pop out of the air; they are based on the best information we have right now. The National Cholesterol Education Program’s expert panel recommends that the first step in a heart-disease-prevention diet be reducing the amount of total fat we eat from 40% of our needed calories to 30%. This is total fat. To keep things simple, we are talking only about saturated fat.
The panel’s recommendation is that the first step is to limit the sat- urated fat to 10% of the needed calories in a day. After all, not many people count calories or even know how many calories they are supposed to be eating! Who wants to calculate how many grams of fat to eat, based on each gram of fat producing 9 calories?
If you do all the calculations for those who are “supposed” to be consuming around 2000 calories or a little less, it comes out to the 20- gram-a-day budget for bad fat we recommend for most people. You’ll notice that this 20-gram-per-day budget is listed on all the standard FDA (U.S. Food & Drug Administration) food labels (for those who are supposed to be on 2000-calorie diet).
As a second step (after limiting total fat to 30% of our calories), the panel recommends limiting saturated fat to supply 7% of the needed calories per day for those at high risk, which figures out to be between 12 and 16 grams a day. Our recommendation for those at risk is slightly less a 10-gram-per-day budget of bad fat. This includes both saturated fat and trans-fatty acids which are in hydrogenated food products such as margarine and shortening. If mayonnaise and salad dressing are prepared with hydrogenated ingredients, they also will contain trans-fatty acids. Figure there is as much bad trans-fatty acids as there are saturated fats in these hydrogenated products.
So, that’s the number part of the budget. It’s simple.
Keeping Track of Bad Fat
When we first set up our program, we had people keep track of how much cholesterol, total fat grams and saturated fat grams they were eating. Keeping track of three sets of numbers wasn’t really necessary. People needed to be taught how to budget the bad-fat grams they would eat each day, along with a few basic principles about limiting the amount of cholesterol and other fat they would be eating.
How do you get started? For a while, start each day with a piece of paper or an index card and write down the grams of bad fat you eat each meal.
How will you know how much bad fat there is in the things you choose to eat? Most packaged foods you buy have a nutrition label that lists grams of saturated fat per serving and the serving size.2 Also, take some time to study the tables in the back of Chapter 12 which list the grams of saturated fat in common foods. The great recipes in Chapter 15 also tell you exactly how many grams of saturated fat (and the exact amount of cholesterol) are in each serving. This is what you want to know and record.
As you go through the day, jot down the grams of saturated fat and trans-fatty acids in everything you eat. This may be one of the most important things you can do to help your heart. It may be a bother and you may be tempted to forget it after a day or two. We encourage you to keep it up long enough to get an idea about how much bad fat is in the food you eat-and to establish a healthy eating pattern.
After you’ve done this for a while and you get used to your daily bad-fat budget, it will come more naturally. Eventually it will be like driving a car. You just do it without having to think about braking, shifting or slowing up before turns and traffic signals. You’ll get a feel- ing for what you can eat and what you shouldn’t-without writing everything down and adding it up.
By the way, no one is checking on what you’re doing day by day- you are on the honor system. It’s a good idea to show your notes to your physician and to keep him or her posted on how much bad fat you are eating each day. For the most part, this program is up to you. It’s your heart-and your life. Cheaters are buried!
If you keep track of the amount of bad fat you are eating, it will make it easier to limit the bad fat that gets into your body. It’s simple.
Let’s look at a few popular foods and add up the numbers. Suppose you had a breakfast of 2 sunny-side-up fried eggs, 3 strips of bacon, a piece of toast with butter and a glass of milk or coffee with 1 table- spoon of cream. How much bad fat and cholesterol did you eat?
| Food | Saturated Fat (grams) | Trans Fat (grams) | Cholesterol (mg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 eggs | 3.2 | 0.0 | 425.0 |
| 1 tsp. butter | 2.4 | 0.5 | 10.3 |
| 3 strips bacon | 3.3 | 0.0 | 16.2 |
| 1 piece toast | 0.4 | 0.2 | 0.9 |
| Coffee with 1 tbs. cream, half-and-half | 1.1 | 0.0 | 5.6 |
Total: 10.4 + 0.7 = 11.1 grams bad fat and 458 mg cholesterol
That’s 10.4 grams of saturated fat and another 0.7 of trans-fatty acids, which adds up to 11.1 grams of bad fat just for breakfast, more than someone on a 10-gram budget should eat in a whole day! Look at the cholesterol-458 grams! Way over budget and the day just started!
Compare this with a breakfast of oatmeal, nonfat milk, orange juice, 2 pieces of toast with a no-fat spray spread, jam and a cup coffee or other beverage with a fat-free creamer:
| Food | Saturated Fat (grams) | Trans Fat (grams) | Cholesterol (mg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 cup oatmeal | trace | 0.0 | trace |
| Sugar | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Nonfat milk | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 cup orange juice | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 pieces toast | 0.8 | 0.4 | 1.8 |
| Fat-free spray | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 tbs. jam | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 cup coffee | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Fat-free creamer | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Totals: 0.8 grams saturated fat, 0.4 grams trans-fatty acid, 1.8 mg cholesterol
This breakfast adds up to only 1.2 grams of bad fat and 1.8 mg of cholesterol.
What a difference!
You may grimace at the thought of oatmeal instead of sunny-side-up eggs and bacon, but doesn’t it sound better than all that fat plugging up your coronary arteries? With an intake of just over a gram of bad fat for breakfast, you can spend more of your bad-fat budget at lunch and dinner-giving you more choices then.
Don’t get too cocky about doing so well for breakfast that you blow it all at lunch. Think about some alternative lunch and dinner menus. There’s plenty of room for imagination.
You saw the differences in the amount of bad fat in the two breakfasts.
Now let’s look at a typical fast-food lunch consisting of a hamburger with cheese, French fries and a chocolate shake:
| Food | Saturated Fat (grams) | Trans Fat (grams) | Cholesterol (mg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheeseburger | 6.4 | – | 50.0 |
| French fries | 4.3 | 6.4 | 14.7 |
| Chocolate shake | 3.1 | 0.2 | 18.3 |
Totals: 20.4 grams bad fat and 83 mg cholesterol
Suppose you eat a safer lunch like a chicken sandwich. A broiled, roasted or microwaved chicken-breast sandwich cooked without skin or extra fat contains only 2 or 3 grams of saturated fat and between 70 and 100 mg of cholesterol. This chicken sandwich on whole-wheat with lettuce and sprouts, a glass of nonfat chocolate milk and an orange totals only a little over 2 grams of bad fat and 80 mg of cholesterol.
Here’s another idea that may seem strange at first, but how about a bean sandwich? It’s an adaptation of a Mexican burrito that’s popular in the southwest. Try it. You’ll like it!
Begin with great northern, navy or pinto beans-cooked vegetarian style without added meat or fat. Combine 1 cup drained beans with two small onions, finely chopped. Mash the beans and the onions together with a fork or in a blender or food processor. If you want to add some spice, stir chopped green chilies (either mild or hot) into the bean mix. Cover two slices of whole-wheat bread (or two lowfat tortillas for burritos) with a layer of romaine lettuce. Spread the bean mix on top. Add salsa or tomato sauce to taste. You could add a layer of alfalfa or bean sprouts. Top with bread or roll up the tortillas to complete two sandwiches or two burritos.
If you eat both sandwiches or burritos, have a glass of fat-free you be chocolate milk and a banana, how many grams of bad fat will eating for lunch? Only 2 grams!
Besides tasting good and being quite filling, this lunch gives you plenty of protein and other nutrients.
These are just a few examples of some of the creative meals you can make. You can have lots of fun coming up with good-tasting food without much bad fat.
We hope you’re convinced that you can do it. You can. To make it easier for you, in the next chapter we’ll take a look at how prepared foods are labeled and some more tips on keeping track of your bad- fat budget.
By the way, is your bad-fat budget 10 or 20 grams a day?
NOTES
May 8, 1994 may have been the most important Mother’s Day ever because from that time forward food products in the United States were required to be clearly labeled with the amount of saturated fat, total fat, cholesterol, calories, serving size and other nutritional facts.
Comparison of Two Daily Meal Plans
High Bad-Fat Meals
| Saturated Fat (grams) | Trans Fat (grams) | Cholesterol (milligrams) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | |||
| 1 cup orange juice | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 3 strips bacon | 3.3 | 0.0 | 16.2 |
| 1 egg | 1.6 | 0.0 | 212.5 |
| 2 slices toast | 0.8 | 0.4 | 1.8 |
| 1 tbs. butter | 2.4 | 0.0 | 10.3 |
| 1 cup beverage | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 tbs. cream, half-and-half | 1.1 | 0.0 | 5.6 |
| Lunch | |||
| 1 cheeseburger | 6.4 | – | 50.0 |
| 4 oz. French fries | 4.3 | 6.4 | 14.7 |
| 10 oz. strawberry milkshake | 3.1 | 0.2 | 18.3 |
| 1 piece apple pie | 2.6 | – | 0.0 |
| Supper | |||
| 1 cup soup (cream of mushroom) | 5.1 | – | 19.8 |
| 6 oz. steak, marbled | 13.6 | 1.8 | 116.2 |
| Hash brown potatoes | 2.5 | – | 0.0 |
| Broccoli | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 tbs. hollandaise | 5.2 | – | 23.6 |
| 2 baking powder biscuits | 2.0 | trace | 0.0 |
| 1 tbs. stick margarine | 2.4 | 3.2 | 0.0 |
| 1 avocado | 4.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 fudge-walnut brownies | 8.0 | – | 160.0 |
| Snacks | |||
| 1 glazed donut | 3.5 | 3.8 | 3.6 |
| 1 cup creamy yogurt | 5.2 | 0.2 | 31.1 |
Totals: 77.6 + 16 = 93.6 grams bad fat and 683.7 mg cholesterol
Low Bad-Fat Meals
| Saturated Fat (grams) | Trans Fat (grams) | Cholesterol (milligrams) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | |||
| 1 cup orange juice | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 cup oatmeal w/raisins | trace | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| w/fat-free milk | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 plain bagel | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
| 1 tsp. fat-free tablespread spray | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 tbs. strawberry jam | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 cup beverage | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 tsp. lowfat creamer | 0.0 | – | 0.0 |
| Lunch | |||
| Tossed salad with salsa | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Great Northern beans | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Barbecue sauce | trace | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 6 oz. broiled skinless chicken breast | 2.6 | – | 107.4 |
| Mushrooms | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 tbs. olive oil (to sauté mushrooms) | 1.8 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
| 2 slices fat-free bread | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 tsp. soft diet spread | 1.8 | – | 0.0 |
| 12 oz. orange freezee | trace | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Supper | |||
| 1 cup consommé | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 6 oz. orange roughy | trace | 0.0 | 30.0 |
| 1 tbs. canola oil (to sauté fish) | 1.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Seafood cocktail sauce | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Baked potato with chives | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Green peas and lemon pepper | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 2 slices white bread | 0.8 | 0.4 | 1.8 |
| Fat-free spread spray | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Spinach/tomato salad with vinegar | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Angel food cake w/strawberry glaze | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Snacks | |||
| 1 apple and/or banana | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| fat-free frozen yogurt | 0.2 | 0.0 | 3.0 |
Totals: 8.4 +0.6 = 9.0 grams bad fat and 142.2 mg cholesterol