Can you explain your thoughts? I remember there being some concern about the health impacts of seed oils, but I'm not finding anything conclusive. This article seems to cover quite a few arguments:
The extraction process turns the oil rancid but it's supposedly okay because there is a process to remove the bad odor. The main concern is that when heated polyunsaturated fats convert to transfats which are bad; the article claims it's fine to cook with as you're renewing the oil frequently but I have doubts it's safe as they admit the process is still happening. Old fryer oil smells odly nasty - do you want even a fraction of that in your home cooking?
Anecdotally, a family member gets headaches from consuming uncooked sunflower oil but olive oil and other fats are fine. I noticed this years before the anti seed oil memes.
Virgin olive oil (not the mafia fake crap) is really great, as is beef tallow.
That's pretty interesting since in my home country, Morocco, cooking with virgin olive oil is not recommended at all.
In fact, even in though my family has owned olive tree farms for centuries we still make sure to buy "modern oil" (as it is called in moroccan) for cooking even if fresh, pure olive oil is available in literal tons. I've heard that it is mostly a persistent myth, and olive oil is perfectly safe for cooking (even at high temps), but my mom would still never let me cook or fry anything with olive oil :). Interesting contrast!
In Spain everyone and their mother cooks / fries with olive oil. Nonetheless, there’s this idea that we shouldn’t be doing it as much, but mainly because of the strong flavor and low smoke point; better to cook with other oils and then add olive oil for the flavor if needed.
Ideally you would cook with a saturated fat like tallow, lard, coconut fat etc as they don't have a double bond to break. Monounasturated fat like (real) olive oil at least has fewer double bonds than polyunsaturated fats (seed oils). Cheaper olive oil is extracted with heat and solvents or even blended with seed oil.
not sure that tallow and lard are necessary, but here's an interesting article that does suggest frying with saturated fats such as coconut oil or ghee, or alternatively, unrefined mustard seed or canola oil. It also has a table with data for several kinds of fats. The disadvantage to animal-derived fats, according to this, is the long-chain saturated fatty acids.
Interesting table - very easy to see which fats are the worst. It's a pity they don't include animal fat in there but I guess it's all from an Indian context. Coconut seems like a good option but it can still go rancid if you don't refrigerate it.
Some the early citations [2 &3] are not the best quality as they are based on questionaries. In the Minnesota Coronary Experiment which involved 9400 institutional participants eating controlled meals they found that cutting saturated fat can reduce blood cholesterol but that doesn't actually make one live longer. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/records-found-in-...
Is it with virgin olive oil? And yes you might be right, the taste is much stronger with olive oil. It might be just that, but now I realized I never asked my mom why we don't do it!
Fats have low freezing points and high freezing points. Lard (mostly saturated) has a high freezing point because it's solid at room temperature. Fish oil has a low freezing point. If fish oil (mostly unsaturated) had a high freezing point the fish couldn't move in water.
This depends on the shape. Saturated fats are long and stack on top of each other, making them solid easily. Monounsaturated/polyunsaturated just talks about the amount of double carbon-carbon bonds. So a carbon would attach twice to another carbon rather than having a hydrogen. These fats are crinkly shaped and have bends in them because of the double bonds. Trans fats change the orientation of hydrogen so that they're straight rather than crinkly and subsequently solid at room temperature rather than liquid.
I don't know the exact mechanism of why trans fats are bad, but it probably has something to do with them not normally being found in nature and them being straight, possibly making the body think it is a saturated fat. Just small structural changes have a big change in effect. Thalidomide, for example, was dangerous because its isomer inhibited blood vessel growth.
Now consider the diet of modern seed oils, where the majority of it is monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat. The industrialization that allows for humans to collect a bunch of tiny seeds and squeeze all the oil out of them has existed for only a few hundred years at most. Crisco was made out of cottonseed oil, which (1) has a ton of trans fats from the hydrogenation process, (2) naturally has gossypol, a compound in that causes male infertility. Plants have a lot of compounds for natural defense. Nobody eats raw cassava because it has cyanide compounds. Only through methods such as fermentation (think cow + lumen), sun bleaching, heating, boiling, grinding, selective breeding etc. can many plant components be converted into nutrition. Egg white also has a lot of natural defense compounds/proteins, which is why egg yolk is less reactive than egg white for those with autoimmune issues.
Since unsaturated fats have double carbon-carbon bonds, it's easier for them to react with things at high temperatures. Since trans fats are now banned, vegetable oil is fully hydrogenated and interesterified. It's possible that fully hydrogenated vegetable oil isn't bad for people, but it's a comparatively new process and I wouldn't want to be the one testing it out. It's possible these processes also introduce unknown toxic substances.
In the past, people used lard, butter, tallow, or in tropical regions coconut/palm. I highly doubt something so historically used is as dangerous as something that's been created in the past hundred years, but the diet of pigs and cows are now also changed to a primarily grain fed diet, which may change their fat composition.
If you look at a lot of nutrition science, the original studies are bullshit. Not untrue, but just that they're wildly distorted. I don't consider a rat eating a processed diet and subsequently isolating a compound, then calling it a vitamin or an essential fatty acid, is in any way generalizable to humans. Now people tend to propagate things like "this has a lot of omegas," etc. without understanding the historical basis of it.
Note that there are nutritional deficiencies such as beri-beri, mangelwurzel, pellagra, B12 deficiency, that are true and real. I'm not denying the existence of vitamins. But they should not be a concern to anyone eating a diverse diet. People should avoid vitamin supplements and (1) eat enough, (2) eat with diversity, and these nutritional deficiency diseases should only be a second thought.
My current thoughts on good health practices are as follows:
- eat enough
- don't eat raw food or plants
- avoid seed oils
- avoid overly processed salted or smoked meats/vegetables
- exercise
- get enough sunlight
- don't eat liver (Tends to be the biggest accumulator of toxins in the body. Why would you eat something meant to filter out toxins? Risk of hypervitaminosis A over a long period too. Limit preformed vitamin A, such as skim milk in the USA. I don't think it's a good additive based on my research. I'm not particularly concerned about water soluble B vitamin additions, water, iodized salt, etc. but may do some more research into it later)
- don't take drugs whether they be statins, birth control, painkillers, anti-allergy, etc.
- cooking in safe pots/pans (not sure what yet, still doing research) (copper + acid = copper leaches out, non-stick degrades at high temperatures, aluminum I've heard is dangerous)
- avoid breathing in car exhaust (it's hard, but I've suspected the air quality in cities even in developed countries is much lower than people believe it is)
I might've forgotten a few here or there. A lot of pesticides accumulate in things such as eggs and milk (noted from Silent Spring). But they're probably fine in limited quantity.
The crux is that seed oils are not dangerous in small amounts, evidenced by people eating it just fine. Rather, they may be cumulative and its effects show up much later in life, so it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect.
I strongly believe that cancer, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome, and other modern diseases have a definite cause and are not just "genetic" as some say, which is a hand-wavey way of minimizing culpability and lets people do nothing about it.
Canola oil as far as I know is the most refined oil on the market. One of the processing steps adds trans fats, and another adds synthetic antioxidants because of the naturally low saturated fat content. You may be fine betting your health on a as of yet “not proven unhealthy” oil but why risk it when you can use something like olive oil which contain beneficial polyphenols and antioxidants and doesn’t need to be processed in 10 different ways to be deemed safe for consumption
