VIDEO: Ditch the Vegetable Oil!
Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome to my very first Instagram TV video. Super excited to be talking to you guys about vegetable oils and cooking oils in general. It seems like a topic that people are really interested in and have a lot of confusion in.
So I want to first explain a little bit more about the history of cooking oils in America. Historically speaking the only cooking fats really available were mainly animal fats like lard which is from pigs and tallow from cows, schmaltz from chickens and then of course butter which is it comes from the cream of milk and that's what people used. To some extent there were plant oils but they were only the ones that were pretty easy to extract without any machinery. So things like olive oil and coconut oil have been around for a long time and for many many years that's what people ate. Heart disease was low, diabetes was low, obesity was low. Nothing was really wrong with those oils.
Separately what happened is the Industrial Revolution came and made it so that we could for the first time extract the oil out of plant seeds. That used to be very hard to do manually you know if you're just grinding the seeds between rocks or whatnot. But with all the equipment available during the revolution they were able to do it cheap and quick and easily. So oils like cottonseed oil came onto the market in a big way. At first they were used for fuel and candles but eventually as electricity came out and fossil fuels became available. People didn't need them for those uses anymore so what happened is possibly one of the greatest conspiracies, so to speak, in American food history. The companies that made these oils for fuel purposes had to find a way to re-purpose them. A decades-long campaign was kicked off in like the late 1800s / early 1900s with the goal of convincing housewives that lard is dirty and that vegetables are clean and they will be better for your family and so you should make the switch.
And products like Crisco became really pervasive across the American cooking scene. They were never researched from a health perspective – that was not really an issue because there was no health problem to solve. But the companies did it, they convinced everybody to make the switch. And then as heart disease did start to tick up around the 1950s it was largely blamed on things like butter and so the companies doubled down and said “hey we can turn vegetable oil made from soybeans into margarine which is kind of like butter and it won't cause heart disease.” Which was never factually true, the butter was not at the root of the heart disease, but they did it and they convinced people and margarine became more popular than butter. Butter and lard sales plummeted, heart disease diabetes and obesity got worse, and that kind of brings us to where we are today. People are finally thinking is this not working? Does this not make sense? Is it logical that we're eating these seed oils that weren't part of the human diet for the vast majority of human history?
And obviously it's not the only issue – sugar also has become pervasive in the same time frame – so it's definitely a multi-factorial problem. But without a doubt these seed oils are part of it. The reason for that is that seed oils contain a lot of what's called omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6 fatty acids help the body have an inflammatory response in the event that there's some sort of invader. That's a good thing – we have to be able to do that to ward off disease. But the thing is we now eat more omega-6 oils than ever in human history. The amount of them that we use to get just by eating nuts and seeds and grains and beans was a good amount. That was the amount we needed to help us stay healthy. But now that we've learned to isolate the oil and we're able to get these oils in large quantities, we are taking in omega-6 fatty acids like never before. That's not surprising when you look at the diseases that are plaguing us now. Heart disease is largely a disease of inflammation. If the plaques in your arteries are becoming bigger and bigger, that's your immune system attacking your own arteries and that's what's causing the blockages and strokes and things like that. The inflammation is really what's to blame. It's also part of a lot of other diseases as well – things like all of the diseases of the gut that we're seeing, possibly a part of obesity and diabetes as well – we’re still learning about that. Inflammation is a major factor – joint disease, all the different types of arthritis – it is a major factor.
So the question is, what do we do how can we reduce this realistically? Step one, no question asked, get these oils out of your house. That's where you have control, that's where you can decide what to cook with. I want everybody to go to their pantry after they watch this video and if you have soybean oil, corn oil, peanut oil, canola oil, grape seed oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil – any of these seed oils. If the oil comes from a bean, a grain, a nut or a seed, that is a seed oil. I know we only call certain things seeds but technically nuts and beans and grains are seeds, so if the oil comes from those ditch it.
Okay so that's step one. At home you can certainly cook with the old traditional things like butter, tallow, lard. But I recognize tallow and lard are tough to get nowadays, especially from pasture raised animals. So stick with the butter. It's easy to find good quality grass-fed or at least organic butter so stick with that. For cooking oils I would recommend olive oil, avocado oil and coconut oil. The reason I like these guys is that coconuts, olives and avocados are actually fatty in the flesh so when they extract the oils from these they're not getting them from the seeds of the plant. They're getting them from the olive, from the coconut, from the green part of the avocado, and so the nutrient profile is nothing like a seed oil. It's not high in the omega-6’s, it's not inflammatory, and it's not that processed because it's not very hard to get the oil out of the fleshy parts, so that's what I generally recommend.
As far as processed food, you're going to be hard pressed to find processed food that doesn't use these oils. These oils are dirt cheap so manufacturers love them. There is a change kind of coming so there are brands like, for example tortilla chips, you know this brand [Xochitl] you can see that it uses palm oil. I didn't include palm oil as one of the oils that I recommend because there's a lot of issues with the ethical harvesting of palm oil. There's a lot of destruction going on in the Amazon so I generally don't think of it as a good household oil from an environmental standpoint. But it is, health wise, a better choice and so if you find processed foods with palm oil you could consider that. If you can't find processed foods with the better oils the other thing you can do is look for processed foods that have organic, expeller-pressed seed oils. Still going to be a lot of omega-6, there's no way around that, but expeller-pressed is a much gentler way of extracting the oil, doesn't use any chemical solvents. And then organic is going to get you away from all the pesticides that are used on these crops, especially considering that a lot of the seed oils come from genetically modified crops. Corn and soy and cottonseed oil – those are all genetically modified, so if it's not organic it's likely GMO.
I just have one little caveat because I keep getting questions about this. I did a video a while back about how i season my cast iron pans and I do use flax oil. Yes, it is a seed oil. I would never cook with it, literally the only thing I use it for is my pans. Yes, we are getting a little bit of it because there's residual on the pans but much of it is getting cooked into the surface of the pan. That’s kind of what makes it so great – it basically solidifies, so we're not getting a ton of it when we cook. We still add good fats to our pans when we cook with them. And then the one other thing I do have in my house that's a seed oil is toasted sesame oil. We just use that as a drizzle on some of our Asian dishes. It's more for flavor than anything, we don't actually cook with it as a primary oil. So you caught me there. Those are the only seed oils I keep, otherwise it's pretty much just the coconut, the avocado, the olive oil and then butter – a lot of butter. Alright have a great night everybody!