ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reviews the salient facts concerning dietary fat and its effects on human health. He provides an overview, since the details of each of the major categories of disease with which dietary fats have been associated will be given by others. The studies of Gage and Fish, which graphically showed the passage of dietary fat through the lymph and blood to the depot fat, set the stage for the next half-century of studies on the metabolism of dietary fat and its effects on human health. Fat fulfills multiple functions in the human body, acting as the major metabolic fuel to meet caloric needs, as the major structural component of the cell wall, and as an essential precursor of several hormones critical to normal existence. The majority of dietary fat is triglycerides, which pass through the stomach unaltered by its acid pH and the gastric proteases.
