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Dietary Fat: Five Myths About Fat | Diet Tips

Think eating less fat will make you thinner? Not necessarily. Answer Fitness debunks the five most common myths people have around dietary fat.

Navigating the sometimes contradictory research and information around dietary fat can make a person’s head spin. Should I eat more fat? Less fat? A different kind of fat? Here are the five most common myths around dietary fat:

Myth #1: Eating more fat makes you fatter

Not true.

Eating more calories than you burn makes you gain fat.

Whether those excess calories come from protein, carbohydrates or dietary fat, any calories that you eat above your daily energy requirements will get stored away as body fat. 

The issue with dietary fat is that it’s extremely calorie dense, meaning that it contains more calories per gram than other macro-nutrients like protein or carbohydrates. This means that gram-for-gram, foods with a higher fat content contain more calories (9 calories per gram of fat versus 4 calories per gram for carbohydrates and protein.)

So if you aren’t careful, you can end up eating more calories in foods with higher fat content, even though you are eating the same amount of food.

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Wolfgang Puck All-Natural No-Stick Cooking Spray | Healthy Food of the Day

Love the flavor of butter, but not the saturated fat and calories that come along with it? Try these butter-flavored non-stick cooking sprays.

The next time you’re in the baking isle at the grocery store, check out Wolfgang Puck’s Butter-flavored All-Natural No-Stick Cooking Spray.

I always keep at least one can of this around (usually right on top of my range) for those times when I need to add a little butter flavor to a dish or need some healthy fat to make the perfect omelette or frittata.

Why butter-flavored canola oil?

First, canola oil contains heart-healthy Omega 3s, is high in healthy unsaturated fats (93 percent), is free of cholesterol and trans fat, and has the lowest saturated fat (7 percent) of any common cooking oil.

Also, because the oil is in a spray form, you tend to use less of it than when it’s liquid. So a 1/3 second spray (0.25 grams) of non-stick cooking oil, for all practical purposes, has zero calories and zero fat.

Obviously, the longer you spray it, the more calories you add, but even if you sprayed it for 6 seconds (which is quite a bit of time), you’d still only be adding around 46 calories and 4 grams of fat to your dish.

The oil also tastes great and contains natural butter flavor (no artificial flavorings which you may find in other “butter” flavored sprays), so it adds a nice richness to your food.

But you don’t need to limit your use of non-stick cooking sprays to coating your pan when making egg-white omelettes. There are dozens of other interesting uses, including:

• sauteing, stir frying and grilling (spray it right on steaks and salmon filets for a little butter flavor and GREAT grilll marks)
• basting and browning meats, poultry and fish
• use it as a finishing oil on veggies (spray it on just before serving.)
• toast, english muffins, whole-grain bagels and high-fiber muffins (give ‘em a quick spray for tasty butter flavor and add a sprinkling of sea or kosher salt to amp things up)
• eggs - a great finish to “canola” fried eggs
• Popcorn — my personal favorite.  Coat microwave or air-popped popped corn with a couple quick sprays of non-stick cooking spray and salt and pepper – or even better, a little seasoned salt. This makes amazing, tasty, and buttery,  popcorn without the usual fat and calories.

If your grocer doesn’t carry Wolfgang’s no-stick cooking spray, don’t fret. There are a number  of other natural non-stick cooking spray options, including, Mazola Pure Cooking Spray and  All-Natural PAM® Butter Flavored non-stick spray, as well as organic options like Spectrum Naturals Non-Stick Organic Olive Oil Spray.

So the next time your tempted to reach for the butter, consider instead reaching for the butter-flavored non-stick spray. Your waist-line will thank you … and so will your heart.

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