A low-fat diet restricts the amount of dietary fat you can eat. Generally, it’s limited to less than 30% of your daily energy intake. However, it can also be determined by the amount of fat consumed in a day, for example, less than 20g.
Often, low-fat diets encourage restricting saturated and trans fats, the ones which are related to adverse health outcomes. They’re often used to promote weight loss or for medical reasons, like metabolic control or protection from heart disease and diabetes.
However, cutting out certain food groups isn’t always healthy. For example, there are certain fats which your body needs to function properly, like omega-3s found in fish, which promote both heart and brain health.
☝️FACT☝️Low-fat processed foods often contain higher levels of sugar which offsets the benefits of cutting fat from the diet, because refined sugar isn’t healthy either .
What is a high-fat diet?
A high-fat diet is essentially the opposite to low-fat. In recent decades, there has been an emergence of diets like low-carb, high-fat like the ketogenic or Atkins diets. Despite their popularity in the mainstream population, there is little data regarding their long-term effects on the body.
The ketogenic diet, for example, is often promoted for weight loss even though it was first devised as an effective treatment for epilepsy. Because these diets are low-carb, fats are the main energy source and make up 60% of the diet.
When it comes to weight loss, these high fat diets can show promising initial results, however their long-term effects may be less beneficial – and it’s one of the least popular diets. One recent study of 487,759 people showed that people who followed a long-term low-carb diet increased their risk of dying earlier from deadly health problems like cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
