Take the bad fat survey now and download a free copy of the "Undersize Me Good Fat Guide"
With a fully illustrated good fat/bad fat chart so you'll know the difference when you choose foods.
Click here to take the Bad Fat Survey

If your kitchen sink is clogged badly enough you might take a plunger to it, trying to move all that congealed fat and backed up garbage. With a really severe blockage you could be forced to call in the plumber.

After your sink gets clogged up a few times someone is likely to tell you not to pour oil or fat down there. Even in small quantities that fat and oil can build up into hard lumps of immovable gunk.

But even though we're smart enough to stop pouring fat and oil down our kitchen sinks we never think twice about sending that same fat and oil into our bodies. Why?

In food bad fats can be disguised in foods that might look delectable like french fries or roast pork. But those bad fats can clog up your cells as badly as they clog up your pipes and drains.

Put in more scientific terms bad fats can make your cell membranes rigid. Nutrients essential for your health must pass through your cell membranes to make it into your cells so having rigid cell membranes won't help.

Worse still, rigid cell membranes can negatively affect the function of insulin receptors in your cells. With your insulin receptors malfunctioning your body could produce far more insulin than it needs.

This condition is know as hyperinsulemia and is linked to a wide variety of diseases including adult onset diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

When your cells are clogged your plumber can't help you but you can unclog those cells and you may be able to do it quickly. A 1998 study in the Diabetes Care journal found a special diet could reverse insulin resistance in as little as four days.

What was this special diet? Thirty percent low fat protein, forty percent low glycemic carbohydrates and thirty percent mainly good fats.

After struggling with a simple way to explain the difference between good and bad fats the solution came to me in an instant. I don't need to explain to people which are good fats and which are bad fats at all. Everybody knows already.

To prove everybody already knows the difference between good and bad fats I designed a simple test. Any seven year old elementary school student could pass this test.

I have included the good fat/bad fat test in it's entirety below. Can you tell the difference between good and bad fats? In a few short seconds you'll know.

The good fat/bad fat test:

Which would you rather eat?

1. The congealed animal fat from a black, filthy fry pan scooped onto your palm

2. A palmful of almonds or

3. Sump oil

No one has failed this test yet - even when I offered to heat up the fry pan. But I'm not assuming my early and somewhat limited research data is accurate. Perhaps in other countries people might enjoy a little sump oil dribbled over a cool salad on a warm summer afternoon.

I've also heard of eskimos eating handfuls of seal blubber on the icy tundras of Greenland. Could the bad fat survey be affected by demographics?

As an objective researcher I'm taking the bad fat survey to an international audience. From the coasts of Cairns to the snowy caps of Colorado you can take the bad fat survey online and see if you can tell the difference between good and bad fats.

Take the bad fat survey now and download a free copy of the "Undersize Me Good Fat Guide"
With a fully illustrated good fat/bad fat chart so you'll know the difference when you eat.
Click here to take the Bad Fat Survey

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Undersize Me Book
The groundbreaking funny, fully illustrated book Undersize Me has a chart explaining simply which are good and bad fats and a diet similar to the special diet mentioned in this article.
For more information on the Undersize Me book click here

Andrew Cavanagh Andrew Cavanagh is a professional health writer and speaker and a member of the Australasian Medical Writer's Association.

He is the author of “One hour to glorious health and permanent weight loss” and the groundbreaking “From depression to glorious health in six steps.” Both books can be downloaded free at this site.

Andrew Cavanagh is also the author of Health Watch, a weekly health feature for regional newspapers.

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All site content copyright 2004 Andrew Cavanagh, all rights reserved.
Images copyright 2004 Mark McLaughlin, all rights reserved.
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Undersize Me images trademark of Mark McLaughlin.