You Should Know How Common Cooking Fats and Oils are Produced
Why? Because common cooking fats and oils are far from being good for your health - let's take a quick look at this. As you'd probably expect, 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. Now, 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, they make these oils less stable, so they are chemically removed to prolong the final product's shelf life. What no one told you before is that some of the chemical solvents used to refine grocery cooking fats are:
These highly toxic substances are used to eliminate light-absorbing molecules - thus shortening the products' shelf life. 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. 
So remember this. If you’d like to find out the highly guarded information on the harmful oxidation that vegetable oils suffer during industrial processing, pick up "Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill" by Udo Erasmus, #1 authority on fats and oils. Why are Most Vegetable Oils Bad Cooking Fats?Besides being already spoiled when bought, 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. And there are the hydrogenated fats - the worst of all. What are hydrogenated fats? They are man-made from unsaturated vegetable oils and fats that have been heat- and pressure-processed to remain solid at room temperature, like all hard and soft margarines and vegetable shortenings. Like deep-fried foods, French fries, donuts? There's mounting research on saturated and unsaturated fats done in the last two decades demonstrating that these unhealthy cooking fats retain enough trans fats and toxic compounds to generate weight gain, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, DNA change, many degenerative chronic conditions, and cancer. Agonizing, isnt't it? How can you avoid all these foods that are - unfortunately such a big part of the Standard American Diet (SAD)? 
There's a very down-to-earth book that will greatly help you shop 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 Berkeley, California for 25 years and her work includes helping families choose a healthier lifestyle through the right nutrition. You simply must have this book by your kitchen counter. ^TOP^ Harmful Cooking Fats and Oils << Return to Healthy Cooking Oils
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