Daily Dose of English 187
Fat
Daily Dose of English 187
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts in all episodes, for all episodes, and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking a little bit about fat, but I also wanna say that I'm using a new microphone. I have just gotten a new microphone and plugged it in and this is a really convenient way to test something because I know how to record. I do it every day and so we are recording right now with a new microphone. I hope it comes out okay. I hear myself okay. It looks fine on the thing. And it does seem to be better. It's higher quality microphone. And I can't as easily surprise it with a P sound, which is great. Um, and, uh, those are called plosives by the way. Uh, picky pesky plosives usually cause problems for microphones. Um, but this one seems to be handling it just fine. So you might not hear as many annoying little puh. sounds, which is good. We don't want those. I also hope that it is a little less finicky as my other one. My other one is a totally fine microphone, in my opinion, but it was a little bit more annoying to use. I think because the sound would get really loud or really quiet. And so I'm hoping that this one's a little bit more moderate, I guess. And it just lets my voice come through more easily. So we'll see. I also got a new microphone arm. So it's a lot easier to move around. So I can move back in my chair. I can move it back and forth really quickly. I can also put it up and out of my way. There we go. Now you're far away from me. And now you're back here. So hello. All right, anyways, enough screwing around with my microphone. Let's talk about fat, which is a pretty big topic and I've got a lot of different things to say on it. I'm mostly talking about like the sort of food, not necessarily like somebody who is fat or using it as an insult or whatever. I wanna talk a little bit more about fat in cooking, fat in like how we perceive it as consumers and people in the world, I think is interesting. I also want to give you a recommendation of a TV show to watch. TV show to watch, I said that weird. Okay, let's get into it. So first, fat is basically a sort of food. Like when you break down food into the different like types of things that really any food is, right? You get things like proteins, carbohydrates, fats, right? These are the various building blocks of our body. of our world, basically, of the organic world of food. There's also sugars in there. I believe that's everything. Fat, sugar, carbohydrates, proteins. There might be another one or two. I'm not a nutritionist or anything. I'm not a dietician, so I don't actually really know off the top of my head. All of our foods aren't that complicated in terms of like the base building blocks, but then you can make infinite things from those building blocks. So there is a lot of complication, right? But fat is one of the fundamental things that makes up a lot of different kinds of foods. The ones that are most obvious are things like oil, right? Oil has mostly fat. I think it's almost completely fat depending on like the source of the oil. Oh, excuse me. But then also you see fat in things like meat, animal meat especially. All meat just has fat in it and on it and around it. Fat is also in things like avocados. There's just so many things that have good fats in them. Nuts as well often have a lot of fat and protein. Legumes is what they're often called. And so fats are all around us necessarily. Fats are all around us all the time in pretty much every food we eat. But especially in the US and I'm sure other Western countries, there is a bit of a fear of fat as a food because it is seen as being the thing that makes you fat and supposedly being fat is bad. And so there's this like chain of poor logic of, Fat equals bad, or rather, like being fat equals bad, which means that, and eating fat makes you fat, so fat equals bad. But that is just not true. There is so much more to it, right? That's like saying nitrogen equals bad, yet nitrogen, like there's nitrogen everywhere in lots of different things in the air we breathe, or oxygen is bad because if you have too much oxygen, you'll die. Well, yes, that's true. You can't just have pure oxygen for 24 hours and expect to live. But we also do need oxygen. We need fats to be healthy. And so not just trying to cut out fat to lose fat is, or yeah, that's not gonna help, rather. There's a lot more different things going on with why people build fat and lose fat. So don't necessarily even take it from me. If you are looking to lose weight or to lose fat specifically, definitely look into it. But the basic thing is that I'm doing is trying to reduce body fat. Essentially is what it is. And like I'm not overweight. I don't have too much fat or anything like that. But I would like to reduce my body fat percentage to basically look better. That is the only reason why I want to. And that comes out of what's called the calorie deficit. So having, eating less food than you burn basically every day. And going into these fat reserves that our body uses for that sort of thing. And so my calorie usage is pretty high actually just as my activity level and my age and height and weight and stuff like that. And I probably already have a calorie deficit just in how I normally eat because I don't eat that much food. I think my daily caloric needs are like 3,200 calories a day or something like that with my current lifestyle. And I don't think I eat that much in a day. I don't think I quite get there. So I have a caloric deficit, which will slowly help me just to reduce that body fat percentage, to look tighter or more cut, I guess are the words that we use. I know fat is really, really important. If you want to be a good cook or a good chef, I really like to cook and it is something that's important to me. And I also like to learn about how to cook better and what's going on in our food and that sort of thing. I'm not an expert, again, by any means. If you want to learn more, there's plenty of great YouTube videos, great books, a TV series I want to recommend on cooking as well, which I'll get into in a second. But fat, understanding and controlling the fat in food is a fundamental skill if you want to make delicious food. because fat is an excellent transmitter of flavor. The physical, essentially molecule of fat is just really, really good at coating our tongues in flavor. Because that's essentially what we're fighting against. We want all of our taste buds on our tongue to experience the flavor of food. And fat is really good at covering your entire tongue in flavor, which is why so many delicious foods have a lot of fat in it because it just makes it more delicious. However, you don't have to use a lot of fat to get really good food. You can just control the fat better. So whether it's by understanding how much you should use or that you should be using a little bit or whatever it is, is very, very helpful. Also buying healthier fats, um, like olive oil and sort of like heavily processed vegetable oil, which is, which is more expensive. Olive oil is way more expensive, but it's a lot better for you. Um, and it does the same sort of flavor things. So choosing your fats well, even, even if you're going to consume less of it overall, which is probably a good thing, but using it better can just be such a, a game changer for your, uh, the flavor of your food. Right, a good example is that I can't really stand to eat a salad that I make without the oil. And just because the flavor just gets so lost and it's so bland. The exact same salad, like I make a good salad, but if you don't have the, just a little bit of olive oil on it, it loses so much of that togetherness and it becomes a lot more boring. Just a splash of olive oil to coat the lettuce leaves and all the different ingredients together to make a cohesive thing is so different. It's really important. And the TV show that I really want to recommend is called Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. It's more of a short docu-series thing. It's not a documentary, just a short series, I guess, following a chef. Her name is Samin. And she goes to four different countries, does a lot of cooking in those countries, focusing around one of these elements of good cooking, as she calls it. Because in her opinion, all good cooking comes down to controlling and understanding these four elements. How do you use salt, fat, acid, and heat in your cooking, in your food, to make it taste delicious? Um, it's a very beautiful series. It's very well shot. It's got a really good, um, sort of, it's not really a story cause it's about food and cooking, but it's got a good story there. Uh, you learn a lot from it and it also just looks fricking delicious. So I definitely recommend it. Um, salt is shot in Japan. Fat is shot in Italy. Acid is shot in Mexico and heat is shot in the U S and so, um, and it's, it's mostly in English. So you, you can get some good immersion time in there, but definitely we would recommend that series. I really like it. Um, but that is everything for today. I just wanted to try out this microphone, record an episode here. So I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learn a little something. If you did, let me know down in the comments below. Um, and I will, I guess, see you again tomorrow for another episode of A Day in the Life of English. Have a good one. Bye.
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