Do you know the main cause of death today?
The answer to that is heart attack. In India, cardiovascular diseases have increased by 59% from 23.2 million (1990) to 37 million (2010). And that's because of your highly refined oils. Vegetable oils, to be more specific.
Now that I have your attention, read the next line carefully - vegetable oils are really bad for you and for the environment. I know it's hard to believe and I'm sure most of you will have a huge paradigm shift after reading this article.
It's difficult to decide what to buy with so many options on store shelves. Butter vs sunflower oil, extra virgin olive oils, ghee (clarified butter), refined oils like vegetable and canola.
Our ancestors have been consuming ghee and butter over centuries. A lot of people have this misconception that consuming these fats will make them obese and they’ll end up having multiple health issues in the near future.
There is evidence that it is vegetable oils, not animal fats that are causing our epidemic levels of heart disease. Shocking, right? Let’s find out how.
Being a complex topic, it is formatted into 8 segments for ease of understanding.
â— Why do we even need fats?
â— What kind of fats did our ancestors consume?
â— What allowed the vegetable oils to come into food supply?
â— Vegetable oils: what are they really?
â— Omega 3 VS Omega 6 fats: Which one is better?
â— Are saturated fats bad for you?
â— What fats and oils should we actually consume?
â— The bottom line.
Why do we even need fats?
What is fat in the nutritional world? It's one of the macronutrients along with carbohydrates and proteins and it is an essential part of our diet. Fats are found in most foods. Some foods have a high fat content, while others have just a small amount.
1. The first function of fat is insulation. There is a thin layer of fat underneath the skin that keeps heat inside the body maintaining proper temperature. This layer also protects the inner core from extreme temperature changes.
2. Protection is the next function of fat. There is a layer of fat that surrounds major organs, protecting them, acting like a cushion, absorbing shock from any sudden impact.
3. The third function of fat is energy production. Fat can be used as a source of backup energy when carbohydrates are not available. Our bodies get 9 calories of energy from one gram of fat.
4. The next function of fat is satiety control. Because fat stays in the stomach longer than other energy nutrients, it makes you feel fuller longer.
5. The fifth function of fat is vitamin absorption. Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat soluble which means without fat they can’t be absorbed into the body.
What kind of fats did our ancestors consume?
The original fats/oils that humans ate in the olden days and had been consuming for centuries were tallow which comes from cows, suet from lambs, lard from pigs and of course butter. Lard and butter were the main cooking oils used in the west. Coconut and palm oil were also used in Asian cultures.
So vegetable oils were really not used for human consumption, they were used for industrial machinery as lubricants in the industrial revolution. At first it was whale oil from the 1820s to the 1860s and they were used for machinery and then when we killed all the whales, we moved over to cottonseed oil which was a byproduct of cotton and was a huge crop in the southern US, the people didn’t know what to do with the leftover oil so they started using that to replace whale oil.
In India, people have been consuming ghee for centuries. It is a goldmine of nutrients, has therapeutic values and can be used internally or externally. Ghee is revered in India for its numerous health benefits.
However, in the 1970s - 1980s these foreign refined oil companies, in order to sell their so called heart healthy oils, intensively bad publicized ghee calling it fattening and unhealthy for the heart. Manipulated by such marketing strategies, we changed our household cooking medium to refined oil.
What allowed the vegetable oils to come into food supply?
Okay so before you become aware of how that happened, you need to know that animal fats like lard, tallow etc. are called saturated fats (they’re not bad for you and we’ll talk about that in a minute) and vegetable oils like corn oil, canola oil etc. are called unsaturated fats which include monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.
There’s a very complex and long process called hydrogenation which was, and still is, used to make vegetable oils palatable. Soap makers and tallow makers (Procter and Gamble) were the ones who originally stabilized cottonseed oil in the early 1900s, and they first thought of selling that as soap (as you know, a lot of your soaps are made from oils) and then they carefully observed the product and thought that it looked a lot like lard so they tried selling it as lard. They had a number of names for this and eventually named it as Crisco and that was the introduction of vegetable oils as a commercial product.
Vegetable oils: what are they really?
As you would have already read above, most vegetable oils go through a very complicated process in order to make their place in the human diet. These oils are extracted from various seeds. Rapeseed (canola oil), soybean, corn, sunflower, peanut, and other oilseeds are the most popular. These new-fanged oils must be extracted in very unnatural ways, unlike coconut or olive oil, which can be extracted by pressing.
Saturated fats, on the other hand, are found in nature and are fully saturated with hydrogens, i.e. they’re much less likely to spoil whereas unsaturated vegetable oils get spoilt quickly. Polyunsaturated fats like corn and canola oil do more harm compared to saturated fat because they’re highly processed which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Omega 3 VS Omega 6 fats: Which one is better?
Now let talk about omega 3 and omega 6 polyunsaturated fatty acids. I know that sounds complicated but I'm going to break that down for you. We'll find out a little bit about omega 3s and then about omega 6s.
Omega 3s, including EPA and DHA are essential for optimal health. They’re considered essential fatty acids. Basically what that means is, that our bodies can’t produce them on their own so we need to take them in through dietary sources. Some good dietary sources are fatty fish including salmon, sardines etc. For vegetarians and vegans, another source of omega 3 is flaxseeds.
Omega 6 fats are also really important for our health however we don't need to consume as much of them as omega 3 fats. Overconsumption of omega 6 fats can actually contribute to inflammation in the body that's why it's necessary to have a proper balance and ratio of omega 6 fats to omega 3 fats.
Sources of omega 6 are found in two types of sources, the more unhealthy sources would be from industrialized or vegetable oils like soybean oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil. Omega 6s are also found in other well sourced foods such as nuts, seeds and some meats as well, so having small portions of these can be healthy in the diet.
Our ancestors typically ate a ratio of 1:1 with omega 3 to omega 6 fats. However, in the industrial revolution, industrialized vegetable oils coming into the market changed the ratio of 15:1 with omega 6 to omega 3 fats.
Besides the industrialized vegetable oils, a lot of these oils are actually hidden in processed foods. You can even find them in a lot of restaurants. So be mindful of that, try to eliminate or decrease those in your diet as much as possible.
Are saturated fats bad for you?
Multiple studies and researches have proved that saturated fats, i.e. animal fats aren't bad for you, in fact, they unclog your arteries and reduce cholesterol levels. Now don't come at me saying my doctor has told me otherwise.
If you haven't heard of Ansel Keyes’s “diet-heart” hypothesis, I’m going to give you a sneak peek about it. He said that saturated fats and cholesterol causes heart disease and that happened in response to the tremendous panic over the rising tide of heart disease with President Eisenhower (34th US president) himself having a heart attack in 1955 and being out of the office for ten days.
The funny part is that, at the time, consumption of saturated fats had already declined in the food supply and what was perfectly rising in lockstep with heart disease was unsaturated vegetable oils, so how crazy to think that you would solve a condition with the food that had just been invented and seemed perfectly correlated with heart disease.
Alright, now that that's out of the way let's talk about how saturated fats are actually good for you or even better than vegetable oils. Dr. Jason Fung said that one study showed the more dietary fat people consumed, the longer they lived or increased their life expectancy. Another study of 20 years could not find the correlation between saturated fat and coronary artery disease.
Another study showed that people who ate a lot of saturated fats had a lower risk of heart disease compared to people who ate very little saturated fats and this concluded that saturated fats aren't bad but actually protective. The number of whole eggs a person consumed had no correlation with cholesterol or heart disease.
Eating carbs with fats controls glucose levels and reduces insulin spike so fats are actually good for you. It has been proved by Dave Feldman that the higher the dietary fat, the lower total and LDL cholesterol.
Don't believe me? Watch Is Saturated Fat Bad? (Science says... No!) Obesity Code Lecture 6 and Dave Feldman - 'The Dynamic Influence of a High Fat Diet on Cholesterol Variability'​​​​​​​
What fats and oils should we actually consume?
Now you all must be wondering if not vegetable oils, then what? Don't worry I’ll help you find the answer to that question.
First of all, animal fats, i.e. saturated fats, are the best form of oils that a human being should consume on a daily basis. Not only do they help in weight maintenance but also reduce the risk of multiple health issues like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel syndrome, macular degeneration (eye damage and blindness), rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, cancer, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease and many more.
Now when I say they're good for you, I don't mean eat an entire stick of butter in one sitting or gulp down a liter of ghee at one. Consume them in moderation and make sure to include carbs and proteins in your meals too along with these healthy fats because anything in excess is a disaster.
Also, not all vegetable oils are bad (well most of them are, but there are a few exceptions).
Traditional fats such as extra virgin cold pressed organic coconut oil which is highly anti-inflammatory and may help with improving your cholesterol panel, extra virgin cold pressed organic olive oil, avocados, nuts - walnuts, cashews, almonds, macadamia etc.
The bottom line
I'm sure that by now all you readers must have got the idea that fats aren't bad for you. But there are certain fats made by unnatural ways that can cause disastrous health issues and you're aware of which ones to avoid (that's right, most vegetable oils) and which ones to include in your diet.
Olive oil is a great example of a healthy vegetable oil and it's also low in omega 6 so it might be one of the best options out there.
There are times when we have to face some harsh truths about our diets to make good changes which can impact our lifestyle in a positive way.
Refer research article: Cardiovascular Diseases in India For more.
