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This is what I ate for breakfast today:

Breakfast of Champions

That is almost 1000 delicious calories coming mostly from fat and protein. Did I mention I cooked it in butter?  Speaking of butter, I actually used to add multiple tablespoons of unsalted butter to my morning coffee instead of the usual cream and sugar.

For anyone having a minor heart attack just reading this and also wondering how I am not morbidly obese, prepare to be educated on the health benefits of a high fat diet.

“Science has proven that saturated fat has been wrongly demonized by the medical establishment for decades” – Yoni Freedhoff, Family doc., Assistant Prof. at the University of Ottawa, and founder of Ottawa’s Bariatric Medical Institute.

You too can have plenty of fat in your diet while staying healthy. Choosing to eat more fat instead of other macronutrients does not cause fat accumulation because weight gain/loss is mainly dictated by a person’s daily energy balance of calories consumed versus calories expended.  Other common misconceptions about high intake of dietary fat, include atherosclerosis (clogging your arteries), high cholesterol levels, and increased heart attack risk. However, as Mark Sisson, a highly prominent health author and blogger, points out, these are usually complex issues which correspond to one’s overall lifestyle and health and depend on many more risk factors. On the other hand, some beliefs are just completely wrong, for example, the Harvard School of Public Health notes that dietary cholesterol does affect total blood cholesterol at all, and this review published by Djousse and Gaziano in Current Atherosclerosis Reports concludes that “there is little evidence supporting a major association between dietary cholesterol and coronary heart disease risk in the general population”.

“Fat is not the problem,” says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.” – Sara Novak, Discovery Channel Fit & Health

With most of dietary fat’s falsely believed downsides out of the way, let’s talk about all of the health benefits of increased fat intake. Fat can be very nutritious. For instance, many sources of dietary fat such as egg yolks, butter and olive oil are also the richest sources of nutrients like choline, vitamin K2, and vitamin E, respectively. Mono- and poly- unsaturated fat’s, like those found nuts, plants, and oils, decrease your risk of heart disease as pointed out by the Mayo Clinic. Finally, my favorite benefit of a high fat diet is the increased testosterone, due to my hobby of weightlifting and testosterone’s beneficial effects on recovery and performance as shown in this article published in the Huffington Post.

My favourite cooking oil, coconut! A healthy source of saturated fat.

-Gurneet Kalra