There is much inaccurate information about oils and fats in the diet. Some of these misunderstandings are:
- A low-fat diet is a healthy diet
- Margarine is better for you than butter
- Liquid oils are good, solid fats such as animal fats are bad
- Eating foods with cholesterol raises cholesterol in the body, which is bad
- Canola oil is healthy
- All oils and fats, hot or cold, are the same
All these are FALSE! Here’s one that’s true, though: you can have plenty of fats and oils in your diet yet still be oil-deficient if you’re eating the wrong ones.
Fat is necessary
Fat is one of the major building blocks of the cells and structures in the body. Your cells have a lipid (fatty) layer around them to keep the good things (nutrients) in and the bad things (toxins) out. Your brain is about 60% fat – so, yes, you’re a fathead, and that’s a good thing. In order to keep these necessary fatty structures healthy, you must eat fats and oils. Even more importantly, you need to eat the healthy oils and avoid the unhealthy ones. Which are which? Read on.
Omega-3 and omega-6 oils
Most oils other than olive oil are either omega-3 or omega-6, referring to their chemical structure. Both are necessary to the body and should be in balance, but people tend to get too much omega-6 oils and not enough omega-3s, so it’s good to focus on increasing the omega-3s. Omega-3s are found mostly in plants, eaten either directly or indirectly as in meat, fish, and eggs. They are found in some seeds, usually along with omega-6s: flax seed, hemp seed, walnuts. A good source of omega-3s is fish, especially those that are wild and have fed on algae. Fish oils are usually easier for some people to digest and assimilate, since the fish has essentially done the digesting for you. Meat from animals that are completely grass-fed is also a good source, since grass has plentiful omega-3s.
Most people, though, get too much of the omega-6 kind of oil. Oils that have a lot of omega-6s include safflower, sunflower, and soybean oils, found in many processed foods.
Solid and liquid
There used to be a clear difference between fats and oils: it was believed that those that are solid at room temperature are fats, saturated, and bad for you; those that are liquid are oils, unsaturated or polyunsaturated, and good for you. After a lot of scientific research, we know better now. Many of the oils, such as canola, soybean, safflower, cottonseed, and corn, are harmful, while coconut oil, which is technically a fat since it’s solid at room temperature, is quite beneficial.
What’s the problem with oils?
Oils are extracted from seeds using technology that isn’t found in nature. This highly concentrated oil, separated from the food that carried it, might not be something that the body can really use, and the extraction process itself can harm the oil since it often involves heat or solvents.
Also, many of the oils used in processed food and cooking oil mixtures have, shall we say, issues. Canola oil is actually toxic in itself. Soy and corn are among the most likely foods to be genetically modified (GMO), with potentially harmful effects. Cottonseed oil is especially bad; used as a cheap filler oil, cottonseed isn’t really a food at all, and cotton is a crop that is heavily sprayed with pesticides.
Trans fats
Trans fats have been in the news, and most people know that they’re bad for us. The word trans refers to the shape of the fat molecule. Trans fats are formed by heating unsaturated oils so that the chemical structure changes, going from something beneficial or harmless to something that is toxic waste.
The more heating, the worse the damage to the oil. If you make fried chicken from oil you just poured out of the bottle, that’s not good, but if you eat fried chicken from a restaurant that has been boiling the oil for days, that’s really not good.
Oil degrades to trans fats with time even if not heated. Oils kept on the shelf for months and years can go rancid and turn toxic. Oils vary in their heat-stability; peanut oil is one of the most heat-stable and best to cook with, olive oil is in the middle, and flax oil is so unstable that it needs to be kept refrigerated and never cooked with.
Butter vs. margarine
Speaking of trans fats, how does margarine compare with butter? Butter is a natural product from cream, while margarine is a chemical product made from hydrogenating (boiling) oils. 20-40 years ago it was believed that margarine was better than butter for heart health; about ten years ago the public became aware of trans fats, which margarine was full of, and so margarine was re-engineered and prominently labeled as having no trans fats. But what was done instead? Whatever the food chemists did, the resulting product probably doesn’t belong in our bodies either. Stick with butter.
Cholesterol
There are a lot of erroneous beliefs about cholesterol: that it’s a bad thing, and that it comes from eating high-cholesterol foods such as meat and eggs. This isn’t the case. Cholesterol is so crucial to the body’s functioning and repair that it’s made in the liver. There are different kinds of cholesterol: HDL, the so-called good kind, and LDL, which is considered harmful. It’s not that clear-cut, though, and there are different subcategories of cholesterol within these two.
Dietary cholesterol isn’t a major source of cholesterol in the body, so you can go ahead and eat meat and eggs after all.
Toxins
Most toxins such as pesticides and solvents are oil-soluble, meaning they will mix with fats and oils more readily than with water. This is both good and bad as far as your use of oil. If your sources of fat are not healthy, such as fats from factory-farmed meat, eggs, and dairy, the fat will concentrate any toxins that are given to the animal. Oils from crops that are sprayed with pesticides are usually major sources of pesticide poisoning for the same reason.
But there’s a good side to the tendency of oil to dissolve toxins. Beneficial oils such as extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) can carry out toxins from the body and are an important part of any detoxification protocol.
Weight
Most Americans would like to lose weight. Since oils and fats are calorie-dense, they are often the first things reduced on a diet. Eating healthful fats and oils can actually help you lose weight in a number of ways:
- If you’re getting enough good oil, you are less likely to crave fried and greasy foods
- Once you reduce your body’s toxin load, you might stop retaining so much water to dilute it
- Coconut oil has been shown to actually help in weight loss
The bottom line
So don’t fear fats and oils. Rather, know how to tell the good from the bad, and enjoy them in moderation.
