When it comes to nutrition, ‘fat’ is a loaded word. There’s a common misconception that fat makes you fat, so it’s the first thing people try to cut from their diet when they want to lose weight. And food companies have done their best to run with this ideology — marketing products as ‘low-fat’, ‘diet’, and ‘healthy’. But does fat really deserve the bad rap it’s had for the last couple of decades? To understand that, we first need to understand what fat really is.

What is fat?

At a chemical level, fats are carbon atoms bonded with hydrogen atoms. But the structure of these atoms varies depending on the type of fat. You may have heard the terms ‘saturated fat’ and ‘unsaturated fat’ being used often in nutrition discourse. These are the two broad categories of fats found in your food. You may also have heard the term trans fats, which is found in processed foods.