In case you didn’t know: Vegetable oils are bad. Bad news. Bad for your health. Bad for the environment.
Just bad.
I get a lot of questions about what fats and oils I use for cooking. It makes sense; after all there is a lot of confusion about fat in general. And with the increasing hype over “heart healthy” vegetable oils and their sky-rocketed consumption level, it’s no wonder people have questions about these highly over-recommended products. It’s hard to eat healthy. It’s hard to eat the right foods (and find healthy, natural supplements) that help your body thrive.
So let’s talk vegetable oils today: What are they? Why do I avoid them? And what are the best fats for cooking?
Ready? Let’s do this.
Vegetable Oils: What are they really?
Vegetable oils are oils that have been extracted from various seeds. The most common include rapeseed (canola oil), soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, peanut, etc. Unlike coconut oil or olive oil that can be extracted by pressing, these new-fangled oils have to be extracted in very unnatural ways.
A non-traditional food with a questionable short history
Unlike traditional fats (butter, tallow, lard, olive oil, etc.) our industrial vegetable oils are a very new addition to the “food” world. In fact, they were practically non-existent until the early 1900s. But with the invention of certain chemical processes and a need for “cheap” fat substitutions, the world of fat hasn’t been the same since.
Consider that at the turn of the 20th century that amount of vegetable oils consumed was practically zero. Today the average consumption is 70 lbs a year. Per person. (And since I know plenty of people who don’t touch the stuff, that means lots of people are consuming even more!)
Of course that number jumped dramatically once the campaign against saturated fats and cholesterol took its public rampage.
Even today, despite the fact that heart disease and cancer continue to rise at an alarming rate while butter consumption is down (and vegetable oil consumption is at an all-time high), people are still believing the hype and buying this very non-traditional, non-healthy food-like product.
(Want to see more disturbing charts? Check this article out.)
Vegetable Oil are Bad: an unnatural process from the start.
Before we talk about the process by which vegetable oils are made, let’s first look at one of my favorite traditional fats: Butter.
Butter is a simple process that comes when cream separates from milk. This is a natural process that only takes a little patience. Once the cream and milk have separated, all you need to do is skim off the cream and shake it until it becomes butter. (And it really is as easy as it sounds, I’ve made butter lots of times. Takes about 5 minutes.)
Now let’s compare that to the production of canola oil. Here’s an overly simplified version of the process