Fat Head!...And Thats OK

Proportion is everything in a diet and Americans are polarized when it comes to their relationship to fats. So I thought after a interaction with a family at work that it's a good subject to touch on.

The interaction went something like this; A family comprised of a husband, wife, and 11 yr old girl were searching through the bar section. I asked if I could help and they told me they were looking for a bar with low fats. I found them one that had 2grams of saturated fat, but they were still unsatisfied. The bar had a total of 11grams of fat. Too much. Finally the young girl came across the fruit leathers and exclaimed "these have no fat it them!" The family by the way had none of the usual tourist bulge. They looked fit to me so I finally curiously asked, "whats so bad about fat?" The father looked at me as if that were a very dumb question, repeated it back to me in a matching tone, so I shrunk off and let them rejoice in the foods with no fat.

For many reasons I thought this very odd. Is it still common thought that NO fat is good and that eating fat free energy bars is healthy?

I wondered about the motives. The nicer part of me likes to believe they were once a Wall-e sized family who had an ah-ha moment. They decided one day that fat was the enemy, and should be avoided at all costs. Who, through much overcoming and testing of will were able to purge fat almost completely from their diet and still now were only just lingering in between "slim" and "average" weight classes. I show up not understanding this and ask an apparently stupid question with evil motive to change perspective and am deemed idiotic.

Well sinister or not here is the other perspective. Fat is not all bad. It's good. And even needed to make your body work well. What parts? All of them. Your brain is 70% fatty. Fat is used to cushion your organs, absorb vitamins A,D,E,K, hold needed minerals, keep your eyesight, and aid a good immune system. That's a lot of stuff and I'm sure there is more. So never try to cut them out completely of your diet.

And what do we hear a lot lately? Omega 3-6-9s. Getting the right fats is key. So make mental notes(if you can) when you hear about food with these fats in them. Slim down your intake of land meats and dairy because the fats(saturated) found in those are responsible for clogging your heart up and junk like that. They're not even all bad either. We just can easily over do those fats.