Why Fats?

In the previous blog post, we looked at the unique characteristics of carbohydrates and their role in nutrition, especially for athletes. Here, let's explore what makes fats unique and important to our diet!

Have you seen how fats are displayed on a food label? They're often divided into two types: saturated fat and unsaturated fat. Do you know which type is healthier? Unsaturated! While we need to have fats in our diet, we want to make sure that we are consuming them mostly in the form of unsaturated fats. You can obtain them through a variety of food sources, including nuts, olive/vegetable oils, and avocados.

Why are fats an important part of our diet? They provide energy! Along with carbs, fats are one of the main nutrients in foods that provide us with the energy we need for sports and exercise. Each gram of fat that we consume supplies 9 kilocalories of energy, which is more than the 4 kilocalories per gram that carbs can provide.

After we consume and break down fats, they are stored in a type of tissue we have called adipose tissue. During sports and exercise, this stored fat is brought to our muscles by being transported through our blood or taken from small lipid stores in the muscles themselves. Do you remember that I mentioned in the previous blog post that carbs are an important energy source for high-intensity exercise? Well, here we have fats, the primary energy source for low-intensity exercise! If you're an athlete who usually does long-distance running or jogging or other types of low-intensity endurance exercise, you want to prioritize fats in your diet because they can provide you with sufficient energy over a longer period of time than carbs can.

Well-trained endurance athletes rely more on fats than carbs as their primary source of energy, and they may even have certain adaptations to help their muscles utilize the stored fats, such as more mitochondria and a better fat oxidative capacity. One way that you can enhance your body's ability to use fat as fuel is through a high-fat, low-carb diet, which is probably more suitable for training than for a competition. If you maintain a high-fat, low-carb diet while you are training in the offseason, you can work on improving those adaptations in your muscles that can allow you to maximize your use of stored fats for energy. Then, when you have intense competitions, you can shift back to your previous diet as you will be better able to rely on fats for energy production, while you can save your stored carbs for occasional segments of high-intensity exercise during your competition.

As we can see, it's crucial to have a combination of both fats and carbs in our diet, especially if we perform both low-intensity and high-intensity exercise, because fats and carbs are two main nutrients in foods that provide us with energy. I hope you've learned some fascinating information about the important role of fats in our nutrition and exercise. If you're an athlete who mostly does low-intensity endurance exercise, make sure you're incorporating fats (preferably unsaturated) into your daily meals, so you'll be able to generate the energy needed to boost your athletic performance!