Medifast Diet Products: Dieting and Fats: Healthy, delicious, nutritionally complete Medifast meal replacement foods such as high protein, low carb, vitamin enriched shakes, bars, entres, drinks, and snacks. can help you loose up to 5 pounds a week!

Well it is time for us to discuss dieting and the consumption of fats in the diet. One of the basic reasons most people gain weight and become obese is the overall consumption of too much fat and therefore too many calories in their diets. Medifast products allow us to lose weight in a healthy manner while restricting calories from fat.

Just what is fat? Fat is composed of fatty acids bonded together to form long chains. We have all heard of saturated and unsaturated fats. Just what is the difference? Saturated fatty acids do not contain any double bonds or other functional groups along the chain. The term "saturated" refers to the placement of hydrogen atoms along the chain. Unsaturated fatty acids are of similar form, except that one or more alkenyl functional groups exist along the chain, with each alkene substituting a singly-bonded " -CH2-CH2-" part of the chain with a doubly-bonded "-CH=CH-" portion (that is, a carbon double bonded to another carbon). Too complicated for the normal person to delve into. Medifast products take all this into consideration and make it easy. A trans configuration, by contrast, means that the next two carbon atoms are bound to opposite sides of the double bond. As a result, they don't cause the chain to bend much, and their shape is similar to straight saturated fatty acids. We have all heard about how trans fats are bad and we should limit the intact of them because they will contribute to the development of heard disease. That is right! They do. Now let's get back to fatty acids.

Our bodies can make most of the fatty acids we need. The human body can produce all but two of the fatty acids it needs. These two, linoleic acid (LA) and alpha-linolenic acid (LNA), are widely distributed in plant oils. Since they cannot be made in the body from other substrates and must be supplied in food, they are called essential fatty acids.The Medifast diet, utilizing the Medifast 5 and 1 plan, gives you all you need. In the body, essential fatty acids are primarily used to produce hormone-like substances that regulate a wide range of functions, including blood pressure, blood clotting, blood lipid levels, the immune response, and the inflammation response to injury infection.

As alway, the key to good dieting is good nutrition.