Dietary Fat
Nutrition experts recommend that fat make up no more than 30 percent of the diet. While Americans have trimmed their fat consumption in recent years, as a nation we’re still about 4 percentage points above the suggested level.
Let’s give dietary fat its due. Fat supplies energy and assists the body in absorbing the fat-soluble vitamins: A, D, E and K. But these benefits must be considered next to its many adverse effects on health. A teenager who indulges in a fat-heavy diet is going to put on weight, even if he’s active. It would take a workout befitting an Olympic athlete to burn off excess fat calories day after day.
Fatty foods contain cholesterol, a waxy substance that can clog an artery and eventually cause it to harden. The danger of atherosclerosis is that the blockage will affect one of the blood vessels leading to the heart or the brain, setting off a heart attack or a stroke. Although these life-threatening events usually don’t strike until later in adult life, the time to start practicing prevention is now, by reducing the amount of fat in your family’s diet. Researchers studying the eating habits of approximately two hundred California high school students were dismayed to find that more than one-third had abnormally high levels of blood cholesterol. Ultrasound scans of their carotid arteries revealed evidence of atherosclerosis already. The carotids, a pair of large vessels located in the neck, serve the brain. One of the doctors involved in the study commented that some of the teenagers’ arteries resembled those normally seen in a person twice their age. Fortunately, at this early stage, the condition is still reversible