Dietary fat doesn’t make you fat, in fact, the fat on your body and the fat you consume should be considered two different things entirely. Fat is the only nutrient that does not raise your blood insulin levels, they are essential for survival, i.e. ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS, they provide satiety, regulate your hormones, allow vitamin A, D, E, and K to be absorbed, and needed for health and vitality. But in the 1950s an American physiologist who studied nutrition and exercise  named Ancel Keys started claiming that saturated fat cause heart disease, back then, the study sounded pretty convincing and thus “low-fat” craze of the begins.

Trans-Fat

Manufacturers of packaged foods jump on board as fast as they could remove all of our precious saturated fats out of their products. They started introducing unsaturated fats which are liquid at room temperature. Most of the time the products fat content were rancid or “unstable” by the time it hits the grocery store shelves. Companies that still had fat in their products figured out how to stabilize their fats for a long shelf life. They did this by a process called “hydrogenation”, pumping hydrogen into the molecule to become stable and solid at room temperature. Therefore creating one of the most terrible things you could put in your body, Trans-fat. Products like shortening, margarine, cake mixes, frosting's, pie dough, fast food, popcorn or anything that had fat in it before were replaced by highly processed GMO non-organic “stable” vegetable oils like corn, soybean oils; trans-fat. When word got out that these seemly healthy “vegetable oils” where supposed to be the cure all to Mr. keys theory of saturated fat causing heart disease, the exact opposite happened, Americans bad cholesterol LDL shot through the roof, along with raising your chance of heart disease, obesity, diabetes or a stroke. Scary stuff, right? Feel like you’ve been lied to your whole life yet?

Saturated Fat

Enough about the bad guys, let’s look at the good guys, Saturated fats the ones Mr. Keys damned to hell. Saturated fats are a chain of carbon atoms that have a single bond.  These guys are the most stable, solid at room temperate, and stand up to high heat cooking; they include your animal fats, butter, cheese, coconut and palm oil. Start cooking your veggies in butter, bacon fat, or Ghee. Try to also make sure all your animal fats are from grass-raised organic farms. Animals not from grass-fed organic farms are fed grains, hormones, and antibiotics store all of these in the fat, so you’d end up consuming fat and a bunch of other nasty things. No, there is no proof that saturated fat is PROVEN to cause heart disease, -insert facepalm here-, (noun, a gesture in which the palm is brought to ones face in disbelief)

Unsaturated Fat

Unsaturated fat, are liquid at room temperature, some of them good and some of them are bad. Remember when I told you liquid fats are unstable at room temperature, which is still accurate. So stay away from your oils at the grocery store most of them are unstable. If an unsaturated fat is solid at room temperature, those are the transfat, which we learned is no good. So what’s left? Your unsaturated fats from whole food sources, such as avocado, nuts, and fish, as a good rule of thumb, try to get your fat from whole food sources, and you should be in the clear.

Nice try Mr. Keys. Now we know that his study was based on loose evidence and we have managed to grow our obesity, diabetes, heart disease into a serious problem. Around the 90s, when the low-fat craze got serious, companies started to replace all fat in products with sugar. And our “problem” turned into an epidemic. But! That is a story for a different day.

If you have been low-fat for a long time, try slowly incorporating fat into your daily meals. Since you’ve been on the low-fat train for some time, it is likely that your body lost the enzymatic to process fat, eating too much of it could cause some serious tummy trouble! But don’t worry, the enzymes will start come back. If you already have some fat in your diet ADD MORE, you’ll thank me later.

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I’m going to take a safe bet and say most of the people in the United States have Nutritional deficiencies. Simply put, we are not eating the right foods to provide optimized micro-nutrients, and even if we were eating a perfect diet, the soil (or hyperponic-chamber) our food is grown in is not exactly “nutrient rich”

I highly recommend supplementing with a high quality multi-vitamin and fish oil for the average American, but when it comes to taking a SSRI*(Select serotonin Reuptake inhibitors, aka one class of an anti-depressant/anxiety) there are several supplements you should consider to optimize your health. SSRIs inhibit the inactivation of serotonin by blocking it’s re-uptake by presynaptic nerve cell endings. That is a bunch of medical jargon for, regulates the serotonin in your body. Among regulating your serotonin it also robs you blind of essential nutrients crucial to human function. Most people in fact, think their SSRI is not working, and need to take more, or completely get off it; leaving them still depressed and now nutrient deficient.

*Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)

·         Citalopram (Celexa)

·         Escitalopram (Lexapro, Cipralex)

·         Paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat)

·         Fluoxetine (Prozac)

·         Fluvoxamine (Luvox)

·         Sertraline (Zoloft, Lustral)

 

Before I get into a complete lists of “must-haves” let’s talk about a little anti-oxidant called Glutathione. Well, it’s not really little. It’s the master antioxidant in each cell of your body, and essential for detoxification of heavy metals and many other things. The big problem is that SSRIs deplete you of this. Now the reason there isn’t a whole page dedicated to “just taking a pill of glutathione”. In fact there is a study that shows that oral glutathione doesn’t even make it past your stomach. BUT, for the purpose of this blog, I’m not going to tell you to go take this pill, but instead recommend precursor Glutathione supplements which will be listed in my “must-haves for surviving SSRIs” below.

High Quality Multi-vitamin: Okay people, this one are kind of a “gimmie” but I have to list it because people will not realize the importance of having a good quality multi. A good quality multi is NOT found at your local convince stores. Most of the vitamins, especially Multis that you find at your convenient store are NOT BIOAVALIBLE, which means your body can’t use them, which means you just got some nice expensive pee!

NAC, N-acetyl Cysteine: Load up on this stuff! Just kidding, 2 capsules of 600mg a day is perfect. NAC is a superb liver support, and one of the many things that supports healthy regulation of that fancy antioxidant, Glutathione. Also, if you are feeling a cold coming on start taking this immediately; it also is given to patients in the ER for acetaminophen (Tylenol) over-dose.

Vitamin C, D: I’m grouping these two together. First and foremost, everyone should be on high doses of Vitamin D, and adequate Vitamin C for health and vitality. Everyone is vitamin D deficient; even people in sunny Florida are vitamin D deficient, take vitamin D. Or, if you are like me, get your Vitamin D levels tested and supplement accordingly. If you are taking glutathione as a supplement, you should be taking 3 times more vitamin C to complement.  Vitamin C doesn’t just protect against cold, but it helps your body make collagen.

Omega 3 fish oils: once again, quality matters. The fat in fish oil is very unstable and typically rancid by the time it hits the shelves of super markets. I personally take a Omega 3 fish oil that has small doses of glutathione in it. There is that word again, Glutathione, it’s important if you haven’t gotten the memo.

CoQ10, CoenzymeQ10: is a powerful anti-oxidant, it helps your cells in a catabolic reaction to produce energy.  Plus, it’s good for other stuff too, like your heart and blood vessels.

Vitamin B complex: Before you go all hi-ho and jump on anti-depressants, you may want to try a B complex first. Yes, it’s that important for health and most “depressed” people are deficient in it.

The truth about depression. I firmly believe that depression is not a diagnoses, it’s a symptom. If you begin taking an anti-depressants you are just putting a giant, really scary, brain altering, Band-Aid on a problem, not fixing it. Before making the leap into pharmaceutical land, I highly recommend getting a comprehensive blood test done, checking your thyroid level (Free t3, Free T4, and TSH), testosterone, and vitamins. Most of the time you can see where you are deficient and supplement accordingly, thus, eliminating your depression/anxiety.

**For all supplements I recommend going to your local “health food” store and talk about your concerns for quality, and bioavailability