7 Dangerous Side Effects of Eating Foods With Too Much Fat
It is true that fats are essential to the body but consuming excess or too much fats does a lot more harm than good. The types of fats and oils you take in each day can impact your health status. The dangerous side effects of eating foods with too much fat ranges from high risk of obesity, heart attack, stroke, fatty liver disease and more.
Obesity
Obesity describes a state in which your percentage of body fat is abnormally high. When you take in more calories than you burn, your body stores the excess as adipose, or fat, tissue. If this situation continues over an extended period of time, you can become overweight and eventually obese. Dietary fat supplies more calories per gram than protein or carbs. It is therefore easier to become obese when you eat large amounts of fats and oils. Obesity itself can be dangerous to your health, as it is a risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, gallbladder disease and hypertension.
High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is connected to overweight and obesity while obesity is connected to eating foods with too much fats. Having a large body size may increase blood pressure because your heart needs to pump harder to supply blood to all your cells. Excess fat may also damage your kidneys, which help regulate blood pressure.
Every time your heart beats, it pumps blood through your arteries to the rest of your body. Blood pressure is how hard your blood pushes against the walls of your arteries. High blood pressure (hypertension) usually has no symptoms, but it may cause serious problems, such as heart disease and kidney failure.
Heart Disease
The fatty foods you eat can contain cholesterol. Much like fatty acids, you need some cholesterol in your body for optimal health, but too much can cause problems. Excess cholesterol in your blood can lead to heart disease, as this type of fat can get deposited along the walls of your arteries. As cholesterol builds up in these blood vessels, less room is available for your blood to pass through, which forces your heart to pump blood harder.
Saturated fats, often found in the same foods with cholesterol, increase your levels of LDL, or “bad”, cholesterol, while unsaturated fats have the opposite effect. The more saturated fats and cholesterol you consume, the greater your risk may be for developing cardiovascular disease.
Cancer
A diet high in fats and oils not only contributes to obesity and heart disease but also predisposes you to developing cancer of the breast, colon or lung. Although the exact mechanism of this relationship is under investigation, diets that derive more than 30 percent of daily calories from lipids, particularly those containing high levels of saturated fats, might increase your cancer risk. The National Cancer Institute suggests consuming no more than 10 percent of your calories from saturated fats each day and minimizing or completely eliminating trans fats from the foods you eat in order to reduce your cancer risk.