The difference isn’t that you can burn fat for Calories. The difference is, simply, that you need a lot more fat and protein than you do vitamins. You don’t have to carefully monitor the nutrition labels to make sure you’re getting enough fat and protein, because you can see the fat and protein.
People whose diets are predominantly composed of ultraprocessed foods are also more likely to not get adequate exercise.
As for your comment about smoothies, that reminds me of the lady who couldn’t figure out why her diet wasn’t working, until she found out that her morning latte contained 400 calories. She assumed it was “diet” because it was made with skim milk.
The diet has to include at least 1% of the calories as fat, in order for the body to get its needed fatty acids. That isn’t much, but yeah, there exist people who don’t get that, either. Fat has 9 calories per gram.
Back in the “grams of fat” craze in the 1990s, one of my friends pointed out that if your diet is composed entirely of things that have the grams of fat printed on the side of the box, you are not eating healthy.
There’s nothing wrong with carbs, as long as they’re whole grains or potatoes. Corn on the cob is whole grain. Popcorn is whole grain. Oatmeal is whole grain.
In the case of vegans, that’s not true when it comes to amino acids. In the case of almost everyone, that’s not true when it comes to DHA and EPA.
It’s not interchangable bulk. You do need specific, quantifiable amounts in your diet.
So what the heck is human body fat made of if it doesn’t contain any of the essential fatty acids?
So it’s a stand-in for the current administration.
I think there are only two essential fatty acids: alpha-linolenic acid and linolenic acid.
Human fat consists of maybe a half dozen other fatty acids, but not those two.
We need to get them from foods like fish, sea food, canola oil, olives or olive oil, chia, hemp, pumpkin … seeds, some nuts, so on.
I would have guessed that our fat does contain some of those, but that we need to eat some, too, because it’s not perfectly preserved going from one form to another. I’m pretty sure our muscles contain all the essential amino acids, but we still need to eat some of those on a regular basis.
That seemed a good point so I researched it out and you are correct and I was wrong. They are part of human fat and even preferentially mobilized during fasting!
https://www.ejinme.com/article/S0953-6205(01)00119-4/abstract
Thanks for the catch and sorry for the mistake.
Thanks! I know that the what makes essential amino acids “essential” is that we can’t manufacturer them out of random other food sources, not even out of random other proteins. We need to consume some of them in our food. I had assumed the same of fatty acids. We need a certain amount of fat. In addition to being part of our energy use, we also use fats to build cell walls and make hormones etc. And so I’d assumed that essential fatty acids were like essential amino acids, they are pieces that we need to use but can’t build from scratch, nor from other fatty acids.
And now I’m curious which fatty acids we make from scratch (well, from carbohydrates) to store energy.
Well human triglycerides consist mostly of oleic, palmitic, linoleum, and stearic acids. We can make them from scratch and do, to store excess energy.
Autocorrect!
Linoleic. Not linoleum. 
Discourse
Wikipedia’s article on essential fatty acids gets into which the body can synthesize from which:
I’d seen enough studies showing lower rates of vision degeneration, brain degeneration, etc. with higher levels of DHA and EPA intake (e.g. through fish oil), that I’d forgotten that - technically - the body can and does produce them from ALA. They’re not “essential”.
That said, regular consumption of these fats does seem to have good health outcomes and it appears to be very difficult for our bodies to convert ALA into EPA and DHA. I gather that they’re called “conditionally” essential fatty acids, on this basis.
Strangely, though, vegans subsist on vegetables - the primary source of ALA. Likewise, they have the highest levels of ALA in their blood. Their EPA and DHA levels measure in at zero because, as I understand it, such a high percentage of their calories is coming from fats (which are still mostly Omega-6s) that their body is simply too swamped in conversions originating from those, to get around to ALA->DHA/EPA conversion. Ref
The needs for DHA and EPA appear to be quite tiny so even an occasional fish or an appropriate seaweed seems to be enough to get people up into the zone where they don’t need to rely on this process.
re: Nova categories only (not the latest Gov’t food pyramid thing)
I don’t think anyone claims that Categories 1-3 are weird or harmful in any way. Those are all real foods in every sense of the word. Cat 1 = unprocessed food; Cat 2 = natural ingredients used in processing (salt, oil, etc.); Cat 3 = real process foods using foods from 1+2. Cat 4, ultra-processed, is not real food. It is food like stuff.
Take your bread example:
Cat 3 bread = flour, water, salt, yeast, process them together, wait/bake = fresh real bread.
Cat 4 bread = bleached flour (stripped, rebuilt), refined oils (stripped, rebuilt), sugar, conditioners, emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial flavors, etc. = food like bread.
There is nothing harmful with each of those specific ingredients on their own. Like Palm oil is pretty healthy until it’s stripped of everything and rebuilt. Even the rebuilt palm oil is not harmful per se, it’s just very much not helpful. It’s the manufacturing ultra-processing (taking all the good out of the ingredient), and recombining them back to make a food like product, and making it very palatable/addicting, that is not nearly as nutritious as Cat 3 bread.
Studies have shown diets with Cat 4 diets are unhealthy, and Cat 1-3 diets are healthy. It is hard to pin down exactly the mechanism as to why, though.
Late: It’s not hard lines between 3-4 so there are always foods that could live in both that people point to to make fun of the Nova categories and how dumb it all is.
But it’s not. If you look at the categories, a lot of food that’s maybe not healthy, but certainly not weird falls into that category. The deciding factor seems to be the degree of processing, not the ingredients, or the intensity/extravagance of the processing.
Stuff like the following are NOVA category 4 (as listed in @DSeid’s post upthread) :
- Ice Cream
- Chocolate
- Candy
- Cookies
- Sausages
- Distilled beverages
- Pastries
- Cakes
It’s like if it’s made of category 3 ingredients, it’s automatically category 4. Which is fine for a somewhat arbitrary categorization system used in academic research, but it’s kind of stupid when used to make choices about one’s diet.
And really, there’s a fair amount of fear-mongering and woo going on with the NOVA categorizations when used as a rubric to make food choices. I mean, there’s nothing inherently bad about food additives, unless you’re a weirdo Luddite. But is is true that foods made using those ingredients are also commonly high in salt, sugar, saturated fat, fat in general, and low in protein and fiber. THAT’s what makes them unhealthy, not the degree of processing or the additives.
Hell, just the way they underlined things in the PDF seems pretty clear that they were trying to gin up some discomfort among the readers of the document. Why else would they choose to underline “industrial formulations” and “synthesized in laboratories”? Or use those phrases in the first place?
It’s hard to pin down precisely, but it’s both. The degree of processing and the ingredients.
It’s like your bread example. There is real ice cream - milk, cream, sugar. And Cat 4 ice cream - reconstituted milk solid, bleached sugars, bleached oils, stabilizers, emulsifiers, etc. etc. Same with chocolate, candy, cookies, etc.
That makes sense, except they have tested for all that and it’s not that. The key is also, what do you mean by “sugar”. What do you mean by “fat”. There is real sugar, and then there is refined/bleached sugar - both are sugar but they are not the same.
Same with fat. Actual Palm oil can be a beneficial superfood. But when you refine it/ultra-process it, it’s stripped of anything that is remotely beneficial and is actually harmful. We still call it palm oil, though. Same amount of “fat”. But the refined palm oil is used to make the cat 4 ice cream, cookies, etc. So it’s not the high fat per se, it’s the specific formulation that is used - Cat 2 palm oil can be high in fat + beneficial (e.g., nutrient, anti-inflammatory), Cat 4 palm oil high in fat + harmful (inflammatory).
Late: I don’t think is well-settled or anything, but I do think there is something there.
I was in shopping a while back looking at the Blue Bunny products (on special) and was bemused that out of maybe twenty products in the freezer only one appeared to actually qualify as ice cream. Their basic vanilla. Everything else fell into the category of “frozen dairy dessert”.