Yep, you should really be eating fat.

Oh, does this fly in the face of conventional health advice.  I've spent a larger percentage of my life avoiding fat than I have eating it (and only in the last year or two have I deliberately begun to seek it out).

First of all, I have several articles/books to recommend.  The first is Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig of the Nourishing Traditions fame.  To side step for a minute, if you have any interest whatsoever in a more natural approach to eating, this, in my opinion, should be the first book to reach for.  I actually took a different route when I began to learn about healthy food.  I read blogs. Lots and lots of blogs.  And while it was great and over time I pieced together most of what is in this book, it took me a long time to do it.  I recommend getting your hands on this book and reading it cover-to-cover.  It has a very large collection of recipes that are traditional and of course all whole foods.  You'll feel like a food pro when you're done.  The next book I'd recommend is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  For a shorter version, you could read Why We Get Fat instead (or in addition).

As far as news articles go, here are a few that have just recently come across my radar: politics and food, eat healthy fats and oils and 5 reasons a healthy fat diet is good for you.  This message is even starting to garner mainstream attention, as you can see here, but I wholeheartedly believe they are dead-wrong about saturated fats.  I don't think eating a plant-based diet is a bad thing at all, and I think people can thrive on that as long as they're getting healthy fats in their diet, but I think animal fats and fats from things like coconut are incredibly healthy.  Here's a good article that touches on all of this and the "saturated fat is still bad for you" misconception, too.

Yes, I said it.  Me, the girl who was convinced living vegan was the only way to live.  To side step yet again, a few things converted me back to the land of animals after watching Forks Over Knives.  The first was this amazingly (AMAZINGLY!) thorough review on the film.  The second was this idea that I just couldn't kick.  I just couldn't wrap my mind around why animal fats - something we've been eating for such a large percentage of our history on this earth, could possibly do these terrible things to us.  Now compare that to things that have been chemically altered to have the fat removed and it seems like complete common sense, right?  Which would you choose?  But I did believe some of their science.  I didn't think they made it all up.  Eventually, I settled on the notion that it isn't meat in general (or dairy in general) that's bad, but the conventional dairy and the conventional meat we eat today instead.  There are so many things wrong with our current system that I could write probably 10 blog posts alone trying to cover it all, but instead I'll link to an article I would highly recommend you read.  In short, you are what you eat.  So the cow that eats food it was not meant to eat (and is pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones) becomes a different animal than a cow who grazes on an open field eating the food its body is meant to eat.  And then WE eat that cow.  What sold me a few years ago were the studies on grassfed beef vs. conventional beef and the differences in their meat.  This was no longer speculation, it was fact.  Omega-3s are the healthier fatty acid, and grassfed beef is higher in omega-3s.  It's also got 4 times the vitamin E and is much higher in CLAs, which is a nutrient associated with a lower cancer risk.  It seems silly to say, because it's almost common sense when you put it this way, but if you could choose between the meat of an animals that eats what it has eaten for all of time (the food God created it to eat) and one that eats food it has never eaten before until the last few decades, which would you choose?

So, I came to the conclusion that eating meat and drinking milk and eating cheese and yogurt and so on is not the problem.  I just quit buying the cheap meat/dairy.  Our eggs and milk come from a local farm.  One of my goals in PRF is to eventually buy all our meat from a local farm, too, but for now we only have beef from a local farm.  Our chickens we buy from Trader Joe's.  We buy the best they have, which is organic and free-range, but I know that's still not the best we could be doing for our health.

Then I began to see article after article pop up about why eating fat will actually burn fat.  And, hence, removing fat from your diet will cause you to gain fat.  At first, it made no sense.  So I kept reading.  It was really the book Eat Fat, Lose Fat that did it for me.  It all passed my common sense filter - much more so than any other "diet" I've ever heard of or tried out.  As a Christian, especially, it makes sense.  God told us it's all ours to eat.  God talks about a land flowing with milk and honey in the Bible.  Historically, milk has been consumed and animals have been eaten for thousands of years (+).  It can't really be killing us, right?  It can't really be the cause of all these "new" diseases (in the scheme of things).  Show me a new way of eating and connect that with "new" diseases (being overweight and obese included) and it'll make sense.  But show me a "new" disease and tell me it's related to food we've always eaten and it just doesn't pass my common sense filter.

Obviously, this is a loaded topic so I'll stop there.  But if you're curious, check out the articles linked here if you have some free time.  It's sort of mind-blowingly awesome and "duh" at the same time.