If fat-soluble vitamins need fat to absorb, the practical takeaway is almost comically simple: stop eating your vegetables naked. Give them a little fat to travel with, and you get far more from the same food.
The habit
This is not a new routine to remember, just a small adjustment to what you already do. A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil over your greens. A few slices of avocado alongside your salad. A dressing made with oil rather than a fat-free one. Roasting your vegetables in a little oil rather than steaming them plain. A scattering of nuts or seeds over the top of a bowl.
You are not adding fat for its own sake, and you are not adding much. You are adding the thing that lets your body absorb the vitamins already present in the vegetables. The salad you were going to eat anyway simply starts working harder for you.
Which fats to reach for
This is where it is worth being clear, because the fats conversation has become confused over the years, and some of the old rules have shifted.
The everyday fats worth building your meals around are the unsaturated ones. Extra virgin olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, and the fats that come naturally with oily fish. These have the strongest evidence behind them, particularly for heart health, where replacing some saturated fat with unsaturated fat is consistently linked to better outcomes.
Saturated fats, the kind in butter, cheese and good-quality meat, are fine in moderation. The old idea that they were simply villains has softened as the research has matured, and the current picture is more nuanced, especially when these fats are eaten as part of whole foods rather than in ultra-processed products. The food itself matters, not just the fat in isolation. So there is no need to fear a knob of butter on your greens or the cheese on your plate. Sensible amounts, real foods.
The fats genuinely worth avoiding are industrial trans fats, the artificially hardened oils that turn up in some heavily processed foods. The evidence against them is about as clear as nutrition science gets: no safe level, no benefit, a direct link to heart disease. Here is what surprises most people. While the US, UK, EU and Canada have banned or capped them, Australia has not. We remain one of the few high-income nations without mandatory limits, and our labelling laws generally do not even require trans fats to be listed on the pack. The reassuring part is real: a great deal was removed from Australian products voluntarily years ago, and average intake here is relatively low. But it does mean the smart move is to lean away from the usual sources: deep-fried fast food, and commercial pastries, biscuits and baked goods with long shelf lives.
The simple version
Reach mostly for the unsaturated fats. Enjoy the saturated ones in sensible amounts, ideally from whole foods. Keep the trans-fat sources, deep-fried fast food and long-life commercial baked goods, to the occasional treat. And make sure every vegetable-based meal has some fat somewhere on the plate, so the fat-soluble vitamins have what they need.
The takeaway: Stop eating vegetables naked: add a little fat so the fat-soluble vitamins can absorb. Build your meals around unsaturated fats like olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds, enjoy saturated fats in moderation from whole foods, and keep the trans-fat sources (deep-fried fast food and long-life baked goods) occasional, since Australia, unlike many countries, does not yet regulate them. For the meals that put this into practice, read the full guide to fat and the fat-soluble vitamins.