AHA Tackles "Bad Fat"

The American Heart Association has taken baby steps in fat acceptance--no, not the movement to get fat people accepted as human beings, but the recognition that fat is an important part of one's diet.

I say "baby steps" because while one hand is acknowledging that fat plays an important role in nutrition, the feds' other hand is still signing out the words for "low fat! low fat!"

But the AHA has rolled out a couple of new aspects to their website, one of which is just weirdness but the other of which is interesting.

Interesting is the new "My Fats Translator." It's one of those online calculators, in this case allowing you to plug in your age, gender, height, weight and activity level and then receiving, in return, a breakdown of not just the total daily calories to maintain your weight and how much fat they recommend for your diet (in the 35% range, of course), but also how they recommend that fat be broken down.

So if you're choosing to lose weight, plug in your "wannabe" information. And what I wannabe is about 150 lbs and I'll just keep it at "sedentary" for right now considering the lowest non-sedentary activity level they offer is 30-60 minutes of exercise per day and while I should do that, I don't.

Doing that, it tells me I should eat 1,860 calories a day, including 52-72g of fat. That fat should consist of a maximum of 14g of saturated fat, 2g of transfat, and 300mg of cholesterol.

I try to avoid trans fat and try to get in a couple of servings of olive oil a day, but I honestly don't pay any attention whatsoever to how many grams of saturated fat I eat, and I don't pay any attention whatsoever to dietary cholesterol.

What do y'all think?

The other, strange new thing on the AHA website, by the way, is the Bad Fat Brothers, named Sat and Trans, of course, who make bad fat jokes in this bizarre animated cartoon. If you don't click on anything, they'll periodically just toss out a bad joke. ("We're the Bad Fat Brothers, and we're real heart-breakers!")

They're right, though. It kinda breaks my heart at how many of my tax dollars went to fund this.