Fat Free Diets May Have Negative Impacts on your Health

Learn about fats and how they're essential for our nutrition. A lack of fat in your diet may cause serious health issues. 

Certain fat types are the main enemies in any healthy diet plan. In fact, this nutrient is associated with excess weight, obesity and is generally considered harmful for your health. Therefore, diets without this are the most popular among those who seek to lose weight or simply follow a healthy lifestyle.

Actually, fat-free diets are not as beneficial as they seem. This nutrient has a bad reputation that has led many people to avoid it on a daily basis. Although, eliminating this nutrient may actually have negative impacts on your health.

Keep reading to find out how harmful a diet without fat may be. In addition, we’ll explain the importance of including certain types of this nutrient in your menu.

The importance of fat in our diets

Fat has become the enemy of most people’s diets. You only need to take a look at how popular “light diets” have become. It’s important to point out that these diets are not always synonymous with healthy nutrition. They’re in fact, just an indication of products containing less fat than the same products made the conventional way.

We need to be aware that our bodies need all nutrients in order to work properly. There are no good or bad nutrients, they’re all necessary. Therefore it’s not convenient to eliminate any of these nutrients from our diets.

In the case of fats, they’re one of the main energy providers for our body. If we don’t consume them, we’ll feel tired and lack energy. Besides, fats play a key role in the process of assimilating vitamins, without fats, this wouldn’t be possible.

Health impacts of fat

We’ve established that fats are essential and must be present in our diets. We’ll explain what happens if you stop eating it. You’ll be amazed at the impact that fats have on our health: the lack of fats may result in serious health issues.

Vitamin deficit

Many people don’t know that fat is fundamental to the absorption process of vitamins. Specifically, vitamins in groups A, D, E and K are only absorbed thanks to fat. If we eliminate fat from our food, an absorption issue will occur and vitamin deficit issues will appear.

Skin problems

Vitamins in groups E and K are responsible for keeping our skin in good condition. They prevent aging and skin dryness. Therefore, the absence of these vitamins will provoke our skin to look weak and dry.

Hormonal alteration

Fat plays a key role in hormonal regulation. If the body has a fat shortage it’s highly likely that hormones will be altered and the body’s balance will be upset. For instance, a frequent symptom in women is unstable or even an absent menstrual cycle.

Not all fat is the same

The fact that it’s essential for our bodies to function properly does not mean you should start eating all the fat you want! However, you need to know that not all fats are the same. Some fats are healthy, however, others must be completely eliminated from our diets.

In a very simple way, fats may be classified according to this criteria:

• Good fats. Among these, we find polyunsaturated and monounsaturated. Dry fruit, olive oil, butter, avocado or legumes are part of this group.
• Bad fat. It’s also known as saturated or trans fat. Food that contains these properties are mainly fast food, salty snacks, and precooked meals. Most of this food is made with a large amount of palm oil.

In conclusion, fat is essential for our bodies to work properly. It may be very harmful to eliminate it completely from our diets. As we have analyzed, the impact on our health would be negative. This doesn’t imply that you can eat a large amount of fat, of any type. Finally, we need to be careful with the amount of fat we eat and avoid any that are considered to be “bad”.