Fat 101

If you visit or live in America for any length of time, you quickly come to realize that Americans are profoundly concerned about fat. By "fat" I do not refer to the four Swedens of blubber America collectively carries around on its butt, but rather the fat that we ingest. This is prominently shown on food labels and as a public service, I will explain what these food labels mean.
First of all, so anxious are Americans about the fat that they ingest that you can see the words "Non-Fat" prominently labeled on 100% fruit jams, berries, and other unlikely products. These labels must be ignored as they have no bearing on our discussion today.
Many products do contain fat, however, and it is essential to know which of these fats you are buying, as some are good for you and others will stop your heart, probably in the check-out line at the supermarket. Supermarket personnel are notoriously unresponsive to handling medical emergencies, continuing to place food into the freezers while a customer beside them collapses on the floor and has a seizure. Eventually the customer also gets put into the freezer when the worker gets to the bottom of the pile.
The vocabulary is where we start, and we don't want to get hung up on technical jargon but rather make everything easy to understand for the layman.
There are two kinds of fat that we eat: you have your saturated fats and your unsaturated fats. There are also trans-fats. Wait, that makes three types of fat. OK, so we have three types of fats.
First let's look at the saturated fats. The reason they are called "saturated" is because they are so full of fat it oozes from every pore. These fats are the ones with serious (maybe even fatal) thigh friction issues. Putting them in an easy-to-grasp term, such as global populations, if saturated fats were people, these would be the Americans of the fat world. They waddle around in your system, sitting down out of breath whenever they get the chance, but worst of all get caught in the turnstiles and doorways of your arteries and veins. This really plugs things up and important things like oxygen cannot make it to your brain. We have all seen terrible examples of this phenomenon; Dick Cheney springs to mind.
The unsaturated fats are lean fats. I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but compared to the saturated fats, they are. Using our global population example above, the unsaturated fats would be your Asians and other thinner populations. The unsaturated fats have less fat oozing from their pores, because – duh – they have not reached the saturation point yet.
It would be convenient if we could wrap this explanation up right here, but unfortunately the real world is just not that simple. Ask former Prime Minister Kan. I am sure he can give you an earful about that! But I digress.
The world of unsaturated fats is divided into the monounsaturated and the polyunsaturated. Mammals have a lot of the latter while reptiles have a lot of the former. As you will remember from your elementary school English classes, "mono" means "one" as in monogamy, or monotheistic. These fats have only one fat in them. Like reptiles, they are very lean indeed. "Poly", as you will also recall, means "more than one" as in polyandry, or polytheistic. These fats have more than one fat in them but not so many as to be "saturated". These fats also have more fun.
Finally, we must talk about the trans-fats. These fats are the middle men in the bipolar world of saturated and unsaturated fats. For that reason, nobody likes them. In America, labels are very proud to claim 0% trans-fats on everything from cookies to automobiles. Even restaurant menus are exclaiming how they are completely free of anything even CLOSELY resembling a trans-fat. So never mind that there might be 6000 calories in the dinner you just ordered; you can rest assured that none of the vicious trans-fats will attack your heart.
I hope this explanation of the fatty world has been helpful. Next week we might take on the daunting task of explaining the difference between "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" so long as the steak I am barbecuing tonight does not kill me before then.