Are some fats good for you? And if so, how should they be taken? Haydn Shaughnessy examines the role of fats in our diet.
It's hard to say fat without sounding a little disdainful. Even the interrogative: Is there much fat in this? sounds like the launch pad for a huff.
Or try saying: "I'm not saying you're fat," without a little hint of shame creeping in.
Celebrity chefs Anthony Worral Thompson and Gary Rhodes try convincing us otherwise. It is normal to see them point to a beef joint and tell us: Look at that fat, look at the marbling running through the meat. Fat is flavour and this fat is beautiful.
I'm not convinced. And nor are scientists like Michael Crawford, professor at the Institute for Brain Chemistry in London, who points out that marbling in meat is simply isolated fat, fat that the animal's body has not known what to do with.
Fat then is never more than an ambiguously malevolent word.
"My cellulite is just the outer expression of some really great marbling on the inside..." doesn't sound right. Nor does... "Love the beer gut".
So let's talk about oil - fats that flow.
In the health food world - a source of wisdom that more of us are turning to - two opinions dominate current thinking about dietary oil.
The first is accepted by the conventional medical world - that is we are under-eating foods that contain Omega 3 oils, which are otherwise known as essential fatty acids. These would principally come from oily fish and flax seeds.
"A very small percentage of the Irish population are eating enough oily fish or using linseed [Flax] oil," says Alan Chaytor-Grubb, a clinical nutritionist practising in Kilbrittan, West Cork.
May saw the launch of three new fats, or oils, on the Irish market. They include an orange-scented flax seed oil, designed to make this normally bitter fatty acid more appealing, a virgin coconut fat that the manufacturers say should be everybody's choice for cooking, and a pumpkin seed butter. All come from the Canadian manufacturer, Omega Nutrition.
The initiative to introduce them here comes from Mary Wedel who helps to organise the Irish Association of Health Food Shops and owns An Tobairín in Bandon, Co Cork.
Why do we need these newly scented fats?
"The Omega 3 fat has been shown again and again to be vital for our diet and we're just not getting enough," says Wedel.
"And even people who buy an oil supplement might end up not taking it or not being able to get children to take it. The taste isn't great normally," she adds.
And the benefits of taking a supplement?
"A reduction in blood pressure, triglycerides [cholesterol] and sticky platelets [Eskimos rarely die of heart disease]," says Chaytor-Grubb.
"Improvements in skin conditions [particularly psoriasis and dry skin], immune function, metabolism, water retention as well as neurological improvements [improvements in behaviour, mental abilities such as learning and concentration, raised energy levels, improved co-ordination and growth in youngsters]."
Another view is that we have a totally disrupted balance in the essential fatty acids that we do eat, over-consuming foods that contain an oil called Omega 6 at a frighteningly high level compared with the low level of Omega 3 that we eat.
Omega 6 oils are derived from poultry - chicken and eggs - and wholegrains, foods that we have been advised to eat more of in recent years.
So now we may be routinely eating too much of one compared with the other and in the view of the World Health Organisation (WHO) we may well be eating too little of both compared with the amount of saturated fat we eat.
The WHO says our diets should contain "an optimal balance between intake of n-6 PUFAs [Omega 6] and n-3 PUFAs [Omega 3], of between 5 and 8 per cent and 1 and 2 per cent of daily energy intake, respectively."
That means that 6-10 per cent of the energy we eat each day should be made up of essential fatty acids. And that the balance between the two should be roughly 4:1.
There is, however, as yet an unacknowledged confusion over what the right balance should be between these essential elements of our diet.
Paleontologist, epidemiologist and fat expert Loren Cordain, who has written a number of innovative academic articles on the original human diet, says the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 should be 1:1.
The US average is between 10:1 and 24:1. Western European countries fall somewhere in between.
Those small doses of supplements that some people take (a teaspoon a day is recommended by Omega Nutrition) may well be wholly inadequate, if indeed supplementation is the right road to take.
Cordain also points out that our former selves, hunter-gatherers, relished the fatty parts of animal carcasses but what he's referring to are bone-marrow, brains, eyes, tongue - foods that have disappeared from supermarket shelves and indeed from many butcher shops.
"We have analysed the types of fat found in marrow, brains and other tissues," Cordain says, "and virtually all organs [of wild animals] are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids and monounsaturated fatty acids but are low in saturated fat."
Cordain and his fellow experts believe saturated fat should make up some portion of the diet. He says about 12 per cent of total calorie intake. The WHO would like to see less and cautions also that some saturated fats are worse than others, but more of that another time.
Coconut oil, by the way, is a good saturated fat and increasingly available in Ireland.
Are supplements the right way to get the right fats?
A German chemist, Johanna Budwig, was one of the first scientists to advocate flax seed oil as a dietary necessity and a medical remedy.
Budwig was a German biologist and lipid (fats) expert who was six times nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Budwig advised that Omega 3 rich foods needed to be taken with a protein that would bind to it, and protect its special characteristics, as well as make it water soluble and therefore more easily utilised by the body.
Eat wild salmon and you have that combination of oil and protein. Eat flax seed or flax oil and you have oil without protein.
This, Budwig argued, would slow the uptake of the oil and allow it to oxidise in the blood, ie go rancid and create the free radicals that threaten rather than enhance our health.
I put this to the oils manufacturer, Omega Nutrition, and the response I got seems to me unsatisfactory.
It advises: Take antioxidants with the oil.
A couple of decades ago polyunsaturated fats got a bad press when it emerged that they might under certain circumstances be carcinogenic. We need supplement suppliers to be a bit more savvy.
Now where did I put the pumpkin seed butter?