4. Reduce Your Intake of Saturated Fats

To maintain good health it is important to eat some fat in our diets. The kind of fat we eat is of great importance herein.

There are two kinds of fat:

• Saturated fat - Having too much saturated fat can increase your blood cholesterol, increasing the likelihood of developing heart disease
• Unsaturated fat - Eating unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat reduces your blood cholesterol

For a healthy diet, it is crucial to reduce the amount of food you eat that is high in saturated fat, like butter, meat, pasties, pies, biscuits, cakes and pastries. Alternatively, try to eat foods rich in unsaturated fat like vegetable oils (including olive oil, sunflower and rapeseed), oily fish, nuts and seeds and avocados.

Foods high in saturated fat

Try to eat these sorts of foods less often or in small amounts:

• meat pies
• meat with visible fat
• sausages
• butter and lard
• hard cheese
• cakes
• biscuits
• pastries
• cream, crème fraiche and soured cream
• coconut oil, palm oil and coconut cream

How Do You Work Out The Fat Content of Food?

Each food has a label showing the fat content of the food. Usually the label states the number of grams (g) of fat per 100g of that food.

Certain foods also provide a figure for saturated fat content, or 'saturates'.

This quick guide will help you to work out whether a food is high or low in fat.

High Fat Content is greater than 20g fat per 100g

Low Fat Content is 3g fat or less per 100g

Should the fat content be between these figures then that is a medium fat level.

High Saturated Fat Content is greater than 5g saturates per 100g

Low Saturated Fat Content is 1.5g saturates or less per 100g

Should the amount of saturates per 100g be between these figures, then that is a medium level of saturated fat.

You need to bear in mind that how much of a particular food you eat affects the amount of fat you will consume.

Attempt to make low fat food choices and reduce your intake of high fat foods.