Healthy fats

Despite what you have been told, the truly healthy fats are the natural ones that we ate for the whole of our existence - until the 20th century; a time when diabetes and all the conditions related to diabetes were either rare or nonexistent. So foods for diabetics, as well as non-diabetics, should contain those fats.

Those natural fats were animal fats and tropical oils. That's all.

So healthy fats are:

• The fat on meat: Beef tallow, Pork fat (lard), Lamb and mutton fat, Goose and duck fat, suet, bone marrow, brains
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• Dairy fats: Butter, cream, full-fat cheeses
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• Egg yolks; there's no fat in the whites. (Egg whites are used in the building trade in Poland!)
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• Coconut and palm oils
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• Olive oil

One big difficulty these days is that, after two decades of 'healthy eating' dogma, it isn't easy to buy really healthy foods for diabetics. This means that getting sufficient fats into your diet is made more difficult than it was half a century ago. So:

• Buy the fattest meat you can find.
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• Don't cut the fat off meat.
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• Don't remove the skin from chicken, duck, goose or turkey.
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• Use duck or goose in preference to chicken and turkey. They are fatter birds, taste better and provide lots of lovely, tasty fat for cooking.
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• Use full-cream milk in preference to semi-skimmed or skimmed, or better still, as most of the milk is water, why not just buy cream? It's cheaper in the long run. And you can get the calcium and protein better from cheese. The best cheeses for calcium are Parmesan, Swiss cheeses and Cheddar.
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• Eat your fruit with cream if you wish, put butter rather than gravy on cooked vegetables, and an olive oil dressing on salads.
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• Eat fatty fish occasionally
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• Cook with an animal fat or coconut or palm oil. With a higher saturated fatty acid content, these are more stable and less likely to be damaged by the heat.
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  For more evidence that saturated fats are healthy, see Saturated fat is better for diabetics than starch