Why you should be eating 'fatballs'

It is outmoded to cast fat as the enemy. These days received nutritional wisdom runs that fats are good — duly, avocado, coconut oil and nut butters are mainstays of any zeitgeist diet. Bookshelves heave with instructive volumes — Eat Fat Get Thin, Fats for Fuel — while civilians follow the strictures more broadly by getting a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, and getting stuck in.

That’s a noble snack — though there’s a new, better and bite-sized way to get your good fats, and one that is less likely to risk choking. Fatballs are small, concentrated balls of nuts and oils, and are not to be confused with fatbergs, those monumental lumps of lard that are found in London’s sewer system. Indeed, the name does it a disservice — some prefer the explosive moniker “fat bombs” — though either way, do not be put off, as the balls are packing nutrients.

There’s plenty of room for experimentation but, as a rule, the balls are a mixture of nut butter, coconut oil, MCT oil and collagen oil. This has a supercharging effect: it’s enough fuel to run on all day. Fatballs’s voguish peer, protein balls, don’t provide as much energy. And fats are good for feeding the brain: pop a ball mid-afternoon and you’ll fire on all cylinders until home time.

“I’ve noticed the fatball trend,” observes Imogen Wolsey, dietitian at Fuel PR. “Since they’re predominantly nuts, nut butters and coconut oil, they can be nutrient-dense.” Though moderation is, as ever, the theme. “They’re accordingly very high in calories.”

At the moment it’s largely a DIY trend — though a few prescient healthy caffs have started doing versions on the theme. 26Grains, a former Old Street pop-up which got a permanent space in Neal’s Yard in late 2016, does cacao and nut balls, and wellness shaman and model Danielle Copperman, who has just released her first cookbook, Well Being, has a recipe for coconut and cashew butter balls.

To make them at home, you need good fats and a blender. Blogger Lee From America makes hers with coconut shreds, coconut oil and coconut butter, melted with seeds, cashews, almonds, cacao, cinnamon and almond milk; if you freeze a batch, it’ll last for months. Nutrition brand My Natural Force offers a recipe for mint chocolate balls with cashewbutter, MCT oil, almond milk, peppermint, walnuts and coconut (pictured).

Wolsey observes that nut butters have essential fatty acids that the body can’t make itself, and that a recent study shows that coconut oil, while technically high in saturated fat, is also shown to raise levels of good cholesterols. “It also has antibacterial qualities,” she notes, “and is full of multi-chain fatty acids that are converted by the liver straight away, rather than stored as fat, so they can be good for the metabolism.”

The good properties depend on the recipe. “You don’t want too much sugar — think about the involvement of other nutrients.” On which note, the best place to find inspiration for your fatball is Instagram, where the snack is a sleeper hit: the hashtag pulls up more than 3,000 posts, and from fat-followers sharing their take. There are balls with beetroot and zested with lemon, salted with caramel syrups or studded with flakes of coconut. Moreover, you can freeze a batch and the balls last for months; they’ll defrost in a few minutes, so if you’re gasping for good fats when you get through the door, you won’t have to drink the peanut butter.