To start, eating an adequate supply of healthy dietary fats is vitally important to your overall health. Fats are one of the main components in all of the cells throughout your entire body. If you eat enough healthy natural fats, your cellular processes will function properly. On the other hand, if you eat heavily processed fats that are found in most of today's processed foods, your cellular function will be damaged as these bad fats become part of your body. And as a result, your body will have to work harder to operate normally, and diseases can develop.

On top of this, healthy dietary fats are necessary for optimal hormone production and balance within the body. Therefore, healthy fats are essential for the muscle building and fat burning processes. Other important functions that dietary fats play in a healthy body are aiding vitamin and mineral utilization, and enzyme regulation. All three basic macronutrients serve important functions for a lean, healthy, and disease-free body.

Knowing this, there are good fats, and there are bad fats. In my other article titled "All Fat is Not Bad - Top 5 Healthy Fatty Foods to Include in Your Diet" I cover the good fats. But here, I want to point the bad fats that you should avoid at all costs!

The Deadly Fatty Foods:

1. Hydrogenated oils (trans fats): These are industrially produced chemically altered oils subjected to extremely high pressure and temperature, with added industrial solvents such as hexane for extraction, and have a metal catalyst added to promote the artificial hydrogenation, followed by bleaching and deodorizing agents.....and somehow the FDA still allows this stuff to pass as food. These oils aren't even worthy of your car, much less your body! They've been linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and more. Even small quantities have been shown in studies to be dangerous. If you care about your health, check the ingredients of everything you buy, and if you see partially hydrogenated oils of any kind, margarine, or shortening, protect yourself and your family by choosing something else. The FDA has mandated that all food manufacturers are required to show the quantity of trans fat on all labels by January 2006.

2. Refined oils: Even if the oils are not hydrogenated, most oils on your supermarket shelves are refined, even most of the so called "healthy" canola oils. Most refined oils still undergo the high temperature, high pressure, solvent extraction, bleaching, and deodorizing processes. Anything labeled vegetable oil, soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil, and even many canola oils have been damaged by this refining process (unless they say "virgin" or "cold expeller pressed"). This damages the natural structure of the fats, destroys natural antioxidants, creates free radicals, and produces a generally unhealthy product. Take note that the explosion of heart disease in the middle of the 20th century coincides quite nicely with the rapid increase in the use of hydrogenated and refined oils in the food supply.

3. Anything deep fried: including tortilla chips, potato chips, French fries, donuts, fried chicken, chicken nuggets, etc. Sorry, these all probably taste good, but all of this junk shouldn't even pass as real food in my opinion!

4. Homogenized milk fat - Milk fat is a very healthy fat in its natural raw state. Milk and beef from grass fed organically raised cows is known to have higher quantities of healthy fats like conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and omega-3 fatty acids compared with grain fed cows. Traditional populations around the world have thrived in perfect health while consuming huge quantities of raw, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized, full fat dairy products. Once again, food processing ruins a good thing by pasteurizing and homogenizing milk fat, rendering it potentially dangerous inside the human body. Unfortunately, you will find it almost impossible to find raw milk in the US unless you personally know a farmer. Check out http://www.realmilk.com for more info on the benefits of raw milk and to find out if it's available near you. As an alternative, cultured dairy products like yogurt have at least had beneficial microorganisms added back to them making them better for you. Realistically, since you probably won't find raw milk, sticking to skim milk is the best option to avoid the homogenized milk fat. If you use butter for cooking, your best option is grass-fed butter.