Many of us enjoy a baked potato alongside our steak, and that would be all well and good if we simply ate the potato. However a majority of us dress that potato up with toppings ranging from sour cream, to bacon, to melted cheddar cheese. These tasty additions to the potato are what leads to far more calories, grams of fat, and pounds packed on than we want or need to remain healthy.
Fat, or adipose tissue, is found in several places in your body. It’s location varies from person to person based on a multitude of factors from gender to hereditary traits passed through families. Toppings such as bacon, sour cream, and cheddar cheese contain large amounts of saturated fat. Just one cup of each can give you 130%, 205%, and 250% of your daily value of saturated fat respectively.
Once ingested, the fat is broken down during digestion by enzymes from the pancreas. Then the individual parts of the fat cells are absorbed into the cells lining the intestine. The cells are eventually reconstructed and released into the lymphatic system which moves them into the blood stream. These cells undergo another deconstruction and fatty acids are then absorbed from the blood into fat cells, muscle cells and liver cells. In these cells, under stimulation by insulin, fatty acids are made into fat molecules and stored as fat droplets.
It is important to remember also that as these fat droplets are stored, and as your body begins to store more and more fat, the actual number of fat cells in your body does not fluctuate, but remains the same with each individual cell simply growing in size to accommodate more cargo.
Avoiding these enticing toppings can drastically decrease the amount of saturated fats that you ingest on a daily basis. It can also allow your body to run more efficiently, instead of wasting energy to store more and more fat within it’s cell walls. Remember that a little extra something on your potato can result in a lot of extra fat on your body.
