FAT(ty Acids)- Friend Not Foe!
/Fat is good for us, and so necessary for our bodies to thrive! We’ve been told for too long now to steer clear of fatty foods, to eat lean meats, low fat dairy, vegetable based oils, to skip the butter or worse to replace it with margarine. However, fatty acids are essential and when derived from high quality fat sources are critical to the health of all of our organ systems (most importantly our heart and brain), our endocrine system, the structure of our cells, our metabolic system, our microbiome and many other functions that our bodies carry out when they are working properly.
Fat is by far the most misunderstood of all of the macronutrients, particularly saturated fats (solid at room temperature and found generally in animal fat and tropical oils) and monounsaturated fats (olives, avocados, nuts etc.) which are vital for many of our body’s structures and functions. Our ancestors ate these foods in abundance and it wasn’t until the 1950’s that we became convinced through inaccurate science known as the “lipid hypothesis” that these fats were the cause of heart disease, high cholesterol, clogged arteries and obesity. Even though this theory has now been debunked for some time, people who were raised with this dogma have a very hard time coming back to the wisdom of their grandparents, especially since low-fat and “diet” foods are such a staple of food marketing.
The irony of these foods obviously being that when you take healthy fats out of foods, not only do they taste very bland and therefore need to be amended with synthetic flavors and sugar, but they also deprive the body of essential nutrients, weaken the overall cellular structure- thereby creating deficiencies which lead not only to disease, but also to eating much more food (generally refined carbohydrates and sugar) which in turn cause obesity (the outcome that those eating these foods were trying to avoid in the first place).
However, not all fats are created equally. The Saturated fats found in animal lard or tropical oils do not go rancid easily and are safest for cooking, whereas monounsaturated fats like olive oil, avocado oil and some nut oils go rancid easily and should only be used for cooking at low temperatures. Polyunsaturated fats are fish oils, and seed oils (like flax). These oils, while imperative to our diets, are very unstable and go rancid easily when exposed to light, heat or oxygen, they should never be heated and always consumed raw. Another category of fats are those that are unsafe to consume under any circumstance and are ubiquitously found in most processed and prepared foods, including most restaurants. These are oils that have been extracted generally from genetically modified plants that are heavily sprayed with glyphosate, put through dangerous chemical extraction processes, then deodorized to mask their rancidity. They then sit on shelves in their clear plastic bottles absorbing petrochemicals, only for us to then turn around and use them at high heats which further damages these oils rendering them even more toxic. These oils are canola, soybean/vegetable, cottonseed, corn, vegetable shortening, and all partially hydrogenated oils.
