It’s a weekend again and a number of us will be visiting some fast food restaurants for snacks or quick eats. The problem is with the quantity of saturated fats in some of these foods. A diet rich in saturated fats is associated with heart disease. Unfortunately, this fat is super abundant in a lot of the fast foods we love and crave.

Here are some tips to help you reduce your intake of saturated fats:
 Eat more white meat eg chicken and fish. Choose the healthier cuts of chicken like the breast as opposed to the wings and drum sticks
 Choose low fat dairy products: Full cream dairy is rich in saturated fat and so from the age of 2 years, children should be switched to skimmed variety or 1 or 2% milk
 Remove the skin from chicken and trim off fats from it during preparation: I see your face already and I know some of you save the bit of chicken with the skin as the last amazing mouthful before you finish up your food 😀 But, here’s some news for you, it’s got loads of saturated fats
 Reduce your consumption of red meat. Most people love their red meats and cannot seem to want to substitute that with anything else. So here’s what you can do, reduce portions, trim off the fat and try out other white meats
 Use healthier oils: Using healthy oils as part of a healthy diet actually helps your health and indeed can help prevent heart diseases. Healthier oils include Olive oil, canola oil. peanut/groundnut oil etc. Olive and groundnut oils contain mono-unsaturated fatty acids and Canola oil contains poly-unsaturated fatty acids. These unsaturated fatty acids are better options than saturated fats, helping reduce the risk of heart disease.

A good tip to follow is this:
Saturated fats are usually solid at room temperature…avoid them!
Mono-unsaturated fatty acids are liquid at room temperature and cloudy when put in the refrigerator. You can use this. It’s a good replacement for saturated fats.
Poly-unsaturated fatty acids are always liquid whether they are at room temperature or in the refrigerator.

Have a great weekend, people 😀