Throw away your vegetable oil ASAP…I mean it. I consider myself to have a pretty flexible approach when it comes to health and wellness. I know not everyone can afford organic, and I know not everyone has the ability to buy healthy foods all the time, and that is okay. But one thing I will never let slip through the cracks or offer up as an ingredient is vegetable oil. You want to know why you are still even using vegetable oil…it’s because it’s a habit, and because it is cheap. But four things you don’t ever want your food to be are fast, cheap, easy and quick! Vegetable oil can cause a whole slew of health problems you do not want to be faced with. Don’t believe me? Let’s talk a little bit about the dangers of vegetable oil on your health and you can make the decision to throw it away on your own!
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Vegetable oils are the fats that are extracted from different kinds of seeds (corn, , sunflower, safflower, soybean and canola (except there are no canola seeds it is created by using GMOs and rapeseeds) and are widely used in cooking and baking, until now. These oils are now no longer advertised as the best oils for cooking use and are actually more harmful than most think. Vegetable oils are extracted from the seeds in very unnatural ways (usually turning them into trans fats), whereas olive and coconut oil can be extracted through pressing; which is why you see “cold-pressed” on their bottles! Thank Your Body gives a great breakdown of how these vegetable oils are actually created!
Back in the day, when I was growing up but more-so when my parents were growing up, we were taught that vegetable oil was good and butter was bad. Researchers stated that if you wanted any kind of heart health benefits then we should get rid of the saturated fats and reach for the polyunsaturated fats with omega-6’s; these being vegetable oil –>corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, and soybean. Well, they were wrong. This idea came from the fact that they thought these polyunsaturated fats decreased LDL cholesterol which therefore reduced the risk of heart disease. After a deeper look into these fats, experts noticed that back in the day individuals were getting much more omega- 3 fatty acids from wild sources like fish and meat. As the years went on and we started to consume more of these “healthy oils” and decreased our intake of natural omega-3’s we saw the dramatic increase of heart disease in humans.Dr. Mark Hyman, family physician and Director of Cleveland Clinic Center of Functional Medicine, concluded that it is actually the omega-3’s that decrease our risk of heart disease, not polyunsaturated fats. These omega-6’s (or polyunsaturated fats) are what is actually causing the increase in LDL cholesterol and decrease in HDL cholesterol, and it is found in all these vegetable oils that the market once called healthy.
Vegetable oils (high in omega-6’s) can cause a lot of detrimental health conditions. These conditions are the exact reason we should be eliminating these oils from out diet, that and the fact that Canola oil is a GMO and is backed by a company called Monsanto. Monsanto is one of the leading global agriculture companies producing GMO’s and are the creator of RoundUp. So the chain goes like this….genetically modified soybean created. Said soybean seed sprayed with RoundUp. Soybean seed creates oil. Oil is sold by the bottle or sold to companies to create processed foods like chips and cookies. You consume the cookies and now have a higher risk of these dangerous health conditions and possible exposure to glyphosate (chemical in RoundUp). It is a viscous cycle, and ends with you refusing to eat these oils. If you still aren’t sold on this, then here are health conditions that can be caused by vegetable oils.
Vegetable oils are filled with polyunsaturated fats (PUFA). Our bodies need fats to rebuild cells and produce hormones, but it is only able to use what we give it. If we are filling our bodies with these PUFAs then those fats are what our body has to use to rebuild. The problem here is that these fats are very unstable and oxidize very quickly. This oxidation causes inflammation and mutation of cells and therefore leads to chronic disease. So, reason #1 we should eliminate these oils.
The way vegetable oils are created is what makes them cancer causing professionals. These seeds (sunflower, soybean, corn) are heated up to extremely high temperatures to actually create the oil. This oil is then hydrogenated (adding hydrogen to a fatty liquid) which gives it that think, oil consistency. The hydrogenation process is actually changing the chemical state of these fats from mostly polyunsaturated fats to trans fats. Trans fats interfere with the natural body process’ of metabolizing nutrients. It is these trans fats that increase individuals risk of breast cancer and colon cancer.
It’s no secret that vegetable oils, more specifically polyunsaturated and trans fats cause heart disease. This is because they increase LDL cholesterol and decrease HDL cholesterol. They also work to increase the thickness of vessels in the heart and therefore decrease blood flow throughout the heart, which again, leads to heart disease.
24 million people in the world today suffer from autoimmune diseases. These range from Lupis, rheumatoid arthritis, IBS, Hashimoto’s disease and much more. The unfortunate part about conventional medicine nowadays is that the symptoms caused by these diseases are being masked by anti-inflammatory drugs instead of finding the root cause and eliminating it. That is like treating smoke inhalation while sitting in a burning house instead of putting out the fire. Dr. Mark Hyman explains, “Autoimmune conditions are connected by one central biochemical process: A runaway immune response also known as systemic inflammation that results in your body attacking its own tissues.” This therefore means that if we consistently put things into our body that cause inflammation and disrupt this process, it is likely to result in an autoimmune disease. And as I stated earlier, vegetable oils are only of the leading foods that cause inflammation in the body due to their fast oxidation process. So, reason number 4 to omit these oils.
Now that I have talked about everything you should NOT be consuming, I wanted to share with you the best oils to cook, eat that contain healthy fats that help our body process’.
• Avocado oil
• Coconut Oil
• Tallow
• Grass-fed butter
• Ghee
• Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) best used cold because of its low-smoke point. If heated too high can turn rancid and be just as inflammatory as vegetable oils
• Nuts – almonds, pecans, walnuts, macadamia nuts
• Seeds – pumpkin, flax, sesame, sunflower, chia
• Fatty fish/meats – salmon, sardines, mackerel, grass-fed beef
• Avocado
Different types of vegetable oils can be found in different kinds of processed foods, and not just as the oil themselves. So the first step to removing these dangerous oils from your diet is to start with literally, the oil. Make sure you dispose of your vegetable oils and DO NOT BUY IT ANYMORE. Even if it is called for in a recipe, I promise a healthier oil will work just fine. There are also other “liquid” alternatives for baking like applesauce or mashed bananas. The second step to decreasing vegetable oils in your diet is to check ingredients. These oils can be found in processed foods like crackers, chips, spreads, dips, crusts, cereals, fried foods, literally anything. So make sure you read your ingredients. At first, you will be incredibly frustrated because these oils are so common, but once you make the shift from wanting those foods because they taste good to eliminating these foods because heart disease would suck, it’ll get better. The third and final step to decreasing these oils is asking questions at restaurants. Fast food joints, bars, diners are all going to use cheap oils because it is, cheap. So make sure you either ask what oil they use at a restaurant and request either no oil or olive oil, or just skip those restaurants all together. I do get that sometimes you are going to consume these things, and that is okay. But being educated and at least LIMITING your intake of these oils when you can is going to greatly decrease the inflammation in your body and keep you healthy and happy!
Again, vegetable oils to avoid include corn oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil, and canola oil. And other dangerous fats to avoid include margarine, shortening and other butter substitutes.
What do you think? Are you going to start eliminating harmful oils where you can?
