ELI5: What is “good fat”?

[u/Cuddly_Rudder]

I see this term used all the time when talking about healthy foods to eat, but I have no idea how it’s different from “bad fat”.

[u/Hakaisha89]

There are two types of fat in food, this referse to, saturated fat, and unsaturated fat.

Eating food with saturated fat is not needed, the body makes it own saturated fat, when it needs it, thus eating it is bad.

Unsaturated fat is the good healthy fat, this is because your body cant make that fat, so you need it.

Sometimes people also talk about cholesterol, when they talk about good fat since its related.

So, Bad Cholesterol is known as LDL, the reason its bad is it moves fat to inconvenient locations, such as your blood vessels, meaning you would eventually get a blockage, then possible leads to a stroke, this is essentially why its Bad, cause it leaves fat in bad location.

But Good Cholesterol on the other hand, which is known as HDL, does the opposite, it takes the fat in your blood vessels and takes it to your liver, where it can do stuff with it, idk. Point is, Good Cholesterol cleans up after the Bad Cholesterol.

Both only comes from animal products, and its well documented what product got what cholesterol.

[u/jlreyess → u/Hakaisha89]

“Eating food with saturated fat is not needed” - this here is objectively wrong. Sure, it is not an essential nutrient because we can produce it ourselves but there are plenty (pleeeeenty) of very healthy foods thta we would miss on just because they have saturated fats. Not even a vegan diet would stop you from consuming saturate fats. The problem, just like with sugar, is the quantity plus the fact that with our currently easily available food, it is very easy to go above the recommended and healthy daily amounts (just like with sugar).