Have some butter with your veggies!

Yet another reason not to fear fat. Natural fats are good for you! It's the industrially-processed refined, bleached, and deodorized vegetable oils that are unhealthy, along with hydrogenated oils.

Laurel Blair, NTP
www.dynamicbalancenutrition.com

https://thehealthyskeptic.org/have-s...h-your-veggies

Excerpt:

A Swedish study recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that eating fruits and vegetables didn’t lower the risk of coronary heart disease… unless said fruits and vegetables were consumed with high-fat dairy products!

Why would this be? The answer is simple biochemistry. Many of the vitamins and micronutrients in food are fat-soluble, which means they cannot be absorbed without the presence of adequate fat. That means that if you eat fruits or vegetables without fat, you’ll absorb only a fraction of the nutrients you would absorb if you ate them with fat.

Tara Parker-Pope, the health columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article about this some time back. She actually gives the ratios of nutrient absorption with and without accompanying fat.

She reports on a study of the nutrient absorption from fat-free salsa with and without extra fat:

For the salsa study, 11 test subjects were first given a meal of fat-free salsa and some bread. Another day, the same meal was offered, but this time avocado was added to the salsa, boosting the fat content of the meal to about 37% of calories. In checking blood levels of the test subjects, researchers found that the men and women absorbed an average of 4.4 times as much lycopene and 2.6 times as much beta carotene when the avocado was added to the food.

Another study done a few years ago at Ohio State University showed that salad dressing with oil brings out the best in a salad when compared to no-fat, low-fat dressings.
When the seven test subjects consumed salads with no-fat dressing, the absorption of carotenoids was negligible. When a reduced-fat dressing was used, the added fat led to a higher absorption of alpha and beta carotene and lycopene. But there was substantially more absorption of the healthful compounds when full-fat dressing was used.