When to eat the good fats?

I love foods that contain good fats. I love almonds, cashews, peanuts and peanut butter (natural kind), walnuts, seeds, etc. Also love salmon and prepare it often.

I follow a few simple rules when I eat: I'll carb-up on workout days and try to eat fewer carbs when not exercising; I try not to eat a large carb-laden dinner before going to sleep; I eat some cottage cheese before bed to get a nice casein protein source.

But when is a good time to eat fats? How does the body work off good fats? Say at night I need a snack and I dig into some almonds that are laden with unsaturated fat. Good idea or bad? What about during the day as a regular snack?

Doesn't matter...casein and all that is pretty dumb anyway. Protein tends to sit around in the digestive tract until your body needs it whether it's casein or animal flesh or whatever. I never really looked into whey, but I doubt it's much different experimentally and empirically.

'Good fats' are only 'good' because they won't kill you as fast as saturated fats if you're a couch potato who smokes a pack a day and has a family history of CAD. EFAs are the only truly essential fats your body needs and the rest don't matter a whole lot for the average healthy person who exercises regularly (in other words, eating 'bad fat' is fine too).

Almonds are also the ultimate gayest food -- total marketing by the industry into making them healthy. If you wanna get technical, walnuts are the healthiest readily-available consumer nuts but it really doesn't matter much.

Keep doing the cottage cheese thing before bed. There is absolutely a difference between whey and casein. The latter is a slow-digesting protein. That's what you want when you're ideally going to be asleep and thus not eating for eight hours every night.

I have been eating fat for breakfast for a while, with great success.

Originally Posted by APK

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The latter is a slow-digesting protein.

Way to buy into marketing. Proteins sit in the intestines until needed by the body for the most part. Whey's fast absorption doesn't mean it's metabolized differently. Amino acids are for the most part restructured into proteins as needed by the body or broken down in the liver into glucose or ketones depending on their type -- whey is not different in this regard to casein. Do not confuse the absorption rate and the rate that it's used by the body since both have different dependent variables.

The idea that casein digests slowly is based on evidence that it forms a gel in the gut which is pretty stupid considering gastric emptying's multitude of variables. Even so, a delay in gastric emptying doesn't mean it's metabolized, utilized, or absorbed much differently at all.