Avoid Poly-Unsaturated Fats in Vegetable Oils
Monday, July 17th, 2006Saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated… what a nasty sounding crowd! But it’s a group of food chemicals that we should really get to know well, if we want to get and stay healthy.
Everyone seems to know by now that the saturated fats should be avoided. We get so-called sat-fats from eating red meat, snack foods like cupcakes, packaged snack bars and candies, chips, and so on. A few years ago, the U.S. government required food makers to print the content of saturated fats on packages. Guidelines tell us to minimize the saturated fats and oils we eat.
But, what is the alternative?
Early in the last century, growers and medical experts began to proclaim the benefits of eating vegetables. Sounds good, right? However, there was a dark side to this sudden explosion of health advice. The ugly secret was unvarnished, naked greed. They were often motivated by manufacturers of new cooking oils made from vegetable seeds such as cottonseed, linseed, hemp, flax, corn, and so on. Since many of these seeds had previously been discarded or simply used as fertilizer for the next crop growth, they were very cheap.
By the 1950s, stores were flooded with cheap vegetable oils designed to be used for cooking, furniture polish, and even floor wax. Manufacturers looked for more and more ways to present their oils, adding sun-burn oil, hair cremes, hair conditioners, and make-up to the growing vegetable oil product list.
The body craves and truely needs oils and fats. Human beings make fats from sugars and other carbohydrates. However, the human body cannot make some fats. Scientists call the fats we need but cannot make “essential fatty acids” or EFAs. These EFAs are extremely important, in fact they are central to health. Essential fats are used to make the membranes of all of the trillions of cells in the body. They play a vital role inside the cell too, where they assist in the metabolism or burning of glucose. Hundreds of metabolic processes require EFA to do their work. Without EFA functionality, you will sicken and die.
EFAs come in two flavors:
- Omega-3 Fatty Acids - from flax seed oil, walnuts, avocados, and fish oil
- Omega-6 Fatty Acids - from many green leafy vegetables including spinach, many seeds, and nuts. Among the seeds that contain lots of omega-6 oil are corn, cottonseed, soybeans, linseed, flax, hemp, and many others.
So, we should eat lots of each of these kinds of foods, and we’ll be healthy, right?
Wrong! It turns out that we only need a few grams or so (a fraction of an ounce) of each of these oils to be healthy. And, when we get way too much of either one of them, we can’t use the other one.
That’s an important point. The reason it happens is due to the way your body breaks down or digests the oils. The body uses digestive enzymes to digest oils. The enzyme that breaks down omega-3 and omega-6 oils is called delta-6 desaturase, or D6D. The body can only make so much of this D6D enzyme at a time. Since it is used to break down both of the fats, you’d think that it would be about evenly split between the two, until it is used up.
But that’s not the case. It turns out that the omega-6 oils fatty acids (from soybeans, corn oil, cottonseed oil, and most other vegetable seed oils) are much more efficiently digested or broken down by the delta6 desaturase than are the omega-3 fatty acids (from fish oils, flax seed, walnuts, etc.). That means that if you eat too much vegetable oil from fried foods, mayonaise, processed foods and snacks, salad oils, and so on, you will not be able to utilize the other good oils you eat from high omega-3 foods.
Scientists didn’t know this until relatively recently. The exact way the body digestes omega-3 and omega-6 oils using delta-6-desaturase is very new science. Now we know that eating too much fried food and mayonaise, salad oil, and other sources of omega-6 can make you sick, and possibly even kill you.
HOW EATING TOO MUCH HIGH OMEGA-6 VEGETABLE OIL IS KILLING US
When D6D is exhausted by eating too much omega-6 vegetable oil, the body is not able to break down omega-3 fatty acids into their constituent metabolic fatty acids. The main product of breaking down omega-3 oils is called eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA. This EPA is used to produce a weak, but very important metabolite family called prostaglandin series-3, or PGE-3.
These PGE-3s work to limit the production of other metabolic molecules called pro-inflammatory cytokines. If these inflammatory cytokines become too active, you will become chronically inflamed. This inflammation is usually a very low-level kind of thing. But it turns out that even low levels of persistent or chronic inflammation will cause your body to develop major, life threatening diseases.
DISEASEASES ASSOCIATED WITH PERSISTENT, LOW-LEVEL INFLAMMATION
- Coronary Vascular Disease, CVD
- Heart Disease
- Hypertension
- Atherosclerosis
- Peripheral Artery Disease
- Diabetes Mellitus
- Stroke
- Prostate Cancer
- Breast Cancer
- Lung Cancer
- Kidney Disease
- Liver Cancer
- Thyroid Cancer
- Brain Cancer
- Ance Vulgaris
- Skin Tags
- Alopecia
- Hypercholesterolemia (High Cholesterol)
- Hyperglycemia
- Hypoglycemia
- Obesity
- Muscular Dystrophy
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Alzheimer’s Disease
…and many more so-called degenerative diseases. In fact many scientists now believe that chronic low-level inflammation may in fact be the root cause of most chronic diseases.
And, eating too much vegetable oil may be the main or at least certainly a very major factor, in causing that inflammation.
So see why we say that you have to limit the vegetable oils you eat?
HIGH OMEGA-6 FOODS TO AVOID
- Soybean oil
- Corn oil
- Cottonseed oil
- Other vegetable oils, except for Olive Oil, canola oil, and limited amounts of coconut oil, walnut oil, grapeseed oil, and palm oil
- All snacks which mention “vegetable oil” or any of those ingredients in their list
- All processed cup-cakes, pies, candies and other treats which don’t have a label to look at. If they don’t have a label, assume they are packed with cheap vegetable oils. They are deadly.
WHY OLIVE OIL IS OKAY
It turns out that a few plants make oils that don’t use-up your body’s reserves of delta-6-desaturase. Those oils include the omega-7 so-called “tropical oils” from coconuts and palm nuts, and also the omega-9 oils from olives. These are two completely different kinds of oils, but you can eat both of them in limited quantities of course, without hurting you. In fact, new research actually suggests that adding small amounts of these oils to your diet will improve your health. Let’s look at olive oil, then at the tropical coconut and palm oils.
Olive oil is called a mono-unsaturated fat. This means that its molecule has one carbon atom that does not have a hydrogen atom hooked onto it.
Coconut Oil - The Good Saturated Fat
Coconut oil is a solid at or below room temperature, around 72 degrees F. This is because coconut oil is a saturated fat, like butter and animal fats. However, there is a BIG difference between coconut oil and other saturated fats — it is a MEDIUM CHAIN TRIGLYCERIDE — only 12 carbon atoms long. Until relatively recently, the significance of this fact went unnoticed by scientist. They classified all sat fats as ‘bad’ for your health. Now we know that MCT 12-carbon sat fats like coconut oil are actually good for you, as long as you eat them in moderate quantities. Coconut oil tends to help fight infections, to kill viruses and bacteria, to increase metabolic rate or ‘fat burning’, and improve many markers for health. You can use two or three tablespoons of coconut oil in your cooking daily. When possible, use it to replace oils that are high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats — such as corn oil, soybean oil, peanut oil, and other common vegetable cooking or salad oils. Omega-3 oils such as fish oil or flax oil should not be replaced. Keep eating them. Let the coconut oil replace other veggie oils. Since it is a solid at cooler temperatures, coconut oil does not make a good oil to use on salads.
