Vegetable Oil vs Animal Fat? 🍽
If you eat out, chances are your food is cooked in — or doused with vegetable oil. If you buy packaged goods like crackers, chips, cookies, or even protein bars and other low sugar so called healthy pacakaged foods, there’s a very good chance that vegetable oils are in the ingredients list. If you buy spreads, dips, dressings, margarine, shortening or mayo, can you guess the likely star ingredient? Yup — vegetable oils.
Is olive oil a vegetable oil? What about palm oil and coconut oil? Technically, yes, these oils come from plants, so they are vegetable oils. But they originate from the fruit or nut rather than the seed and are easier to extract.
We were all trained that vegetable oils were good and butter was bad. We were told, even by government and medical associations, to use more vegetable, seed and bean oils (like soybean, corn, safflower, canola). Chances are, this reader’s mom (like most of us) was convinced by the government and food industries that vegetable oils are safe to use as a heart-healthy alternative over traditional saturated fats but truth is these vegetable oils are the major contributors to heart disease and cancer.
These highly unstable, highly inflammatory oils were given a gigantic push by advisory groups we trusted, including the American Heart Association, WHO, the National Education Cholesterol Program, the National Institutes of Health and even our government’s own dietary guidelines. Many well-respected scientists and our doctors told us to stop using saturated fats and use the polyunsaturated fats instead.
Turns out they were completely wrong.
Vegetable oils contain mostly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids, which means they are liquid at room temperature. It also means they are typically less stable than predominantly saturated fats. This is because unsaturated fatty acids have one or more double chemical bonds that react with oxygen more easily than the single bonds in a saturated fatty acid.
Even if vegetable oils can be stabilized during production to achieve a reasonable shelf life, adding heat can oxidize (damage) them. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118035/
Some animal studies have shown that consuming repeatedly heated vegetable oils may increase blood pressure and cause other adverse health effects due to the formation of aldehydes and other potentially toxic compounds https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20573259/
The unsaturated fats found in vegetable oils, when they’re heated, tend to oxidize. In this form, they’re more dangerous to body tissues and can trigger inflammation, a known risk factor for making blood-vessel plaques unstable enough to cause a heart attack.
Let me cut through this confusion. The very idea that vegetable oils are better than saturated fats (like butter and lard) comes from the belief that they lower total and LDL cholesterol, so they presumably reduce our overall risk of heart disease.
Following this type of advice means swapping out butter, meat and lard for vegetable oils including corn, soybean, sunflower, canola and safflower oils, which are all omega 6-rich, inflammatory polyunsaturated fats.
Yet if we look at human history, we consumed much more omega 3 fats and much less omega 6 fats than we currently do, since wild foods are very rich in omega 3 fats. The main source of omega 3’s today is fish, yet wild game and wild plants, which are very high in omega 3s, used to be a much bigger part of our diet.
Wild meat and grass-fed beef contain about 7 times as much omega 3 fats as industrially raised animals, which have almost none. Virtually all of the beef and animal products your great grandparents ate were pasture-raised, organic, grass-fed and contained no hormones or antibiotics. There was simply no other kind of meat to eat.
Introducing refined oils into our diet and moving away from grass-fed and wild animals increased our omega 6 fat intake. Corn, soy, cottonseed and canola oils skyrocketed, while omega 3 fats have dramatically declined. In that surge, many Americans sadly became deficient in these essential omega 3 fats.
Omega 6 fats not only fuel your body’s inflammatory pathways, but also reduce availability of anti-inflammatory omega 3 fats in your tissues, resulting in more inflammation.
In other words, omega 6 fats undo any benefit eating omega 3s would normally give you. They also reduce conversion of plant-based omega 3 fats (called alpha-linolenic acid or ALA) into the active forms of omega 3s called EPA and DHA by about 40 percent.
Consuming too many omega 6 fats also increases the likelihood of inflammatory diseases and links to mental illness, suicide and homicide. In fact, studies have shown a connection of mental with inflammation in the brain.
VEGETABLE OIL is a label that includes oils such as:
👉 canola
👉 soybean
👉 corn
👉 sunflower
👉 safflower
👉 grapeseed
👉 rice bran
These oils are unstable when heated, causing them to oxidize 💀 When you consume oxidized they oils cause oxidative stress within the body.
Most of these oils are brought to high heats during processed and are already rancid when you buy them! ❌ Therefore even consuming them at room temperature can be harmful. Most vegetable oils require significant industrial processing. Heat, cold, high-speed spinning, solvents like hexane, degumming agents, deodorizers and bleaching agents are typically used to process the seeds into a palatable oil.
Millions of years ago, the only vegetable fats our ancestors consumed likely came from wild plants. Around 4000 BC or earlier, pressed olive oil became a staple in the diets of people living in Italy, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries.
The vegetable oils we know today were developed at the end of the 19th century, when technological advances allowed oils to be extracted from other crops.
On top of that, the processing they go through causes trans fats to be created! ❗ Even if the label says "trans fat-free" I would still be cautious.
Two studies tested various vegetable oils and found that 0.4-42% of the oil was trans fat! 🤯 (Mossoba et al., 2013, O'Keefe et al., 1994)
If the label reads "vegetable oil" it contains the cheapest of the above oils available.
ANIMAL FAT includes rendered fat and animal products used for cooking such as:
👉 tallow
👉 lard
👉 butter
👉 ghee
👉 duck fat
These are a better option for cooking as they are much more resistant to heat 🔥
Animal fats are also rich in fat soluble vitamins: A, D, E and K 👏
Because they are high in saturated fat, they raise HDL cholesterol levels. This is a type of cholesterol that you want to be high. Lower your ratio of Triglycerides:HDL, less likely you're to have heart disease. TGs:HDL ratio is one of the most reliable and easiest predictor of heart disease. Another would be Hs-crp, which also goes up substantially by consumption of vegetable oils.
There has been a lot of evidence emerging showing that saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease, and is actually beneficial for a lot of reason! 🥳 (Astrup et al., 2020, Chowdhury et al., 2014, Schwingshackl et al., 2014)
Nature don't make bad fats, factories do.
What do you use for cooking?
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