When it comes to cooking and preparing foods, you may be comfortable with a standard routine of buying a piece of meat and cooking it in light vegetable or olive oil and perhaps breading it, seasoning it and serving it. But if this is something you do regularly, you might want to know that the oil you’re using could be bad or even extremely dangerous for your health.
New research has shown that, as opposed to what was proclaimed prominently by health authorities in the past, cooking with animal fat — especially butter — is actually much, much healthier than using any type of vegetable oil — including supposedly healthy olive oil, canola oil or sunflower oil.
While olive oil has indeed been shown to have positive health benefits for the heart and other organs of the body, if you apply heat to it, you bring it beyond its “smoke point,” and you rapidly lose all those benefits and actually introduce carcinogens into the food you’re cooking. In fact, all vegetable oils from canola oil to soybean oil to corn oil are bad for you in this way. That’s because all these oils contain double bonds at a molecular level — these bonds change when exposed to heat, oxygen and light.
When you buy junk food or food cooked at a restaurant, you may be getting even worse nutrition than you might with merely the vegetable oils mentioned above. That’s because very often, these manufacturers and commercial kitchens are cooking their products with hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, otherwise known as trans-fats.
Oils that are hydrogenated receive hydrogen atoms that convert them from unsaturated fats — fats that are liquid at room temperature — to those that are solid or semi-solid at room temperature. But this process also breaks the naturally “crooked” molecular double bonds and randomly converts some of them to “straight,” trans-fat bonds. In fact, partially hydrogenated oils are even worse than fully hydrogenated ones because their carbon atoms are not fully saturated, allowing more room for trans-fat bonds to form.
As you may or may not be aware, trans-fats are not processed well by the body. They accumulate fat deposits in arteries, particularly those in and around the heart, that can be extremely hazardous to your cardiovascular health. Consuming trans-fats in excess is a quick route to life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, heart failure and diabetes.
Even if an ingredient list doesn’t explicitly contain hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, it may include natural substitutes such as palm oil that are almost as bad for your health. Palm oil has been shown to boost cholesterol levels, and its extraction has devastated vital rainforest areas of Malaysia and Indonesia — the primary places where palm oil plantations exist.
These areas are also some of the last habitats left on Earth for tigers, leopards, elephants, orangutans and rhinoceroses. Many people are unaware that square kilometers of these habitats are being lost daily so that their snack foods can have better consistency and a longer shelf life. And the deforestation is only one step in the process; much of what’s cleared from these areas is then processed with heat, which creates huge amounts of greenhouse gases. The clearing process can involve forced or child labor, adding even more misery to the legacy of this commodity product.
Almost all junk food contains large quantities of trans-fat or trans-fat substitute ingredients; that’s what makes these “foods” taste so good. Some examples of consumable products that contain massive amounts of these harmful ingredients are potato chips (Pringles are one of the worst offenders), snack cakes (think Hostess), cookies (yes, Oreos), ice cream (Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs) and anything containing chocolate (from chocolate bars to Nutella).
Instead of consuming products like these that are filled with unhealthy trans-fats or trans-fat substitutes, it’s healthier to eat fresher, more “homemade” foods and snacks like baked goods that are made with butter and animal fats. While once upon a time, these fats were vilified as the causes of cholesterol buildup, researchers are now discovering that in limited quantities, these types of fats may actually be sources of “good” cholesterol and better for the body than consuming sugars and/or other complex carbohydrates.
In fact, if you cook, you should be cooking with butter or lard, which can withstand high temperatures and not have their molecular bonds break. Although it might sound counterintuitive to believe that eating butter or lard is actually healthy, both are made from animal fat, and animal fat occurs naturally in your body.
One healthy alternative to butter is not margarine — which is chock-full of trans-fats — but coconut oil. Coconut oil is also able to withstand the high heat of cooking without its bonds breaking.
Of course, one of the downsides of butter and lard is that they can only be stored for limited amounts of time before they turn rancid. Consuming out-of-date butter or lard is risky because of bacteria they contain that cause food-borne illnesses.
This is why neither product is generally used for any item that sits on a shelf for too long (and why you should be wary of consuming any items containing these substances that you believe have been lying around for long periods of time).
Theoretically, the fresher or more recently made the food is (containing butter or lard), the healthier it will be. Be wary of any food — whether it’s purchased in a supermarket, in a restaurant or on the street — that comes in a package or that’s been sitting on a shelf for an undefined period. In the best case, these products serve as “filler” your digestive system simply processes to get out of the way, with very little or no nutritious value extracted. In the worst case, however, these products will slow you down, make you feel tired or quite literally put you to sleep as your body struggles to deal with the rotten or out-of-date ingredients they contain.
Be especially wary of packaged or “sale” foods that are sold in cheap outlets such as dollar stores; there’s a reason their price is low — typically they’re close to or past their “sell-by” dates, and they can have a seriously negative effect on your health.
~ Health Scams Exposed
