Discover the Deadly Truth about Common Supermarket Cooking Fats and Oils! Find Out How they Contribute to Obesity and How You Can Protect Yourself
Why should you know how common cooking fats and oils are produced? Because - for the most part - these bad fats are very harmful for your health. Let's take a quick look at this before going to the healthy cooking oils and fats.
As you probably know, common vegetable oils like canola, corn, safflower, soybean, and sunflower oils are obtained through pressing the plants’ seeds. The mass left is then chemically treated (typically with hexane gas) to extract even the latest drop of oil from it.
As you'd expect, this freshly expelled oil still contains many healthy compounds including oil-soluble vitamins, carotene, phytosterols, chlorophyll, lecithin, and other beneficial compounds for your health... However, these beneficial compounds make the oil less stable (thus shortening the products' shelf life), so they are chemically removed - process known as "refining".
Bet you didn't know what kind of chemical solvents are used to refine grocery cooking fats...
caustic soda (a corrosive base used to burn clogged sink and drain pipes open)
phosphoric acid (a corrosive acid used commercially to degrease windows)
various bleaching clays
And there's even more. Bleaching creates a bad odor and taste, so the oils are further de-odorized at very high temperatures and then artificially flavored for an "acceptable" taste for the consumer, which is YOU.
As you can imagine, the final product is a highly-processed, odorless, colorless cooking oil with a long shelf life that sellers tell you to use in frying, baking, and sautéing. That's what you are using everyday as cooking fats and oils.
So remember this.
If oils in your grocery store do not specifically say "unrefined" or "cold pressed" on the label, they’ve been processed by the methods described above.
Because, besides being already spoiled by the time you buy them, most polyunsaturated vegetable oils (canola, corn, safflower, soybean, and sunflower) are too high in omega-6 and they further aggravate an already out-of-balance essential fatty acids ratio in your body.
As all this wasn't already enough, these oils get easily burnt, or oxidized when you cook with them. Their unstable chemical structure is easily damaged during cooking, creating an array of fatty-acid aberrations: cyclized, cross-linked, fragmented, bond-shifted, polymerized toxic particles and deadly trans fats... Find out here why are trans fats bad?
Here's the scoop of it.
Trans fats, or hydrogenated fats, are man-made from unsaturated vegetable oils that have been processed through heat and pressure to remain solid at room temperature (e.g. all hard and soft margarines and vegetable shortenings).
Highly popularized in the last few decades, artificially hydrogenated cooking fats are found everywhere in all processed and frozen foods: pizza, pies, soups, cookies, pastries, crackers, chips, all baking mixes and most cereals.
Do you like deep-fried foods, French fries, donuts? Think twice before ordering them - they are all made with hydrogenated fats.
You should know that there's mounting research on saturated and unsaturated fats done in the last two decades. It demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that these unhealthy cooking fats retain enough trans fats and toxic compounds to generate weight gain and even obesity, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, DNA change, many degenerative chronic conditions, cancer...
Agonizing, isnt't it?
How can you avoid all these foods that - unfortunately -are such a big part of the Standard American Diet (SAD)?
I can't recommend enough a very down-to-earth book that will greatly help you to shop for and use the right fats and oils for your whole family: Raising Low-Fat Kids in a High-Fat World by Judith Shaw.
She was the Educational Director of The Family Institute of Berkeley in California for 25 years and her work includes helping families choose a healthier lifestyle through the right nutrition.
You'll simply LOVE to have this book by your kitchen counter. It's full of delicious breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks recipes giving you practical tips for adapting everyday menus by replacing healthy cooking oils for these dangerous cooking fats. Take a look now at Raising Low-Fat Kids in a High-Fat World and see for yourself >>
When it comes to Healthy Fats and Oils, here are my TOP 10 Picks:
"Thank you, thank you, thank you for putting together such a wonderful site! Eye-opening info on the different body types... it really helped me understand how to adjust my meals to lose weight without craving sweets and being hungry all day... or crushing after lunch. I've already lost 12 pounds in the last three weeks and I'm thrilled!! Never ever thought it would be so easy!"
by Udo Erasmus, the #1 worldwide authority on fats and oils.
by Judith Shaw. 
