Vegetable Oils Have Nothing to do with Vegetables!

By Kim Marquardt, RN MSN

This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.

*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.

They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.

I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!

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Let's talk vegetable oils! 

Which incidentally have NOTHING to do with vegetables (What's a Canola?)

 
They are in fact, ultra refined and processed SEED oils and there is no shortage of evidence to suggest they are bad for humans, but are very unfortunately touted as "heart healthy alternatives" to saturated fat (butter, lard, tallow, coconut oil, etc.) that humans have been cooking in for centuries.

When saturated fat was demonized in the late sixties by Ancel Keys in efforts to wipe big, bad cholesterol off the face of the earth, the nation needed to figure out what to cook with! Well, Proctor and Gamble were there with a solution. Intro Cottonseed, Canola, and Crisco!! 

The Science

One of the most comprehensive and largest diet studies ever done was the Minnesota Coronary Experiment. Some of the results were left unpublished for decades, only to be discovered and show that:

"...those who ate more vegetable oils (primarily corn oil) did indeed lower their cholesterol by nearly 14% compared with those who did not, but that after a year or more, they did not see any lower rates of heart disease or dying from heart events. In fact, for every 30mg/dL drop in cholesterol, there was a 22% increased risk of death. So people who ate animal fats tended to live longer than those who switched to vegetable oils."

The 7 year comprehensive Sydney Diet Heart Study showed that those who replaced olive oil and butter with safflower oil and margarine had a 62% higher rate of death during the seven-year study.

So why are they so bad for us?

A couple reasons...

• At super high temperatures (which is exactly how they are used in cooking and frying) they become unstable and oxidize creating free radicals that are destructive to your body's cells, think trans fats.
• They are extremely high in omega 6 linoleic acid which is the compound in the body responsible for inflammation. 

Now while the body needs to respond to disease or injury with inflammation sometimes, we are so inundated with "vegetables" oils in our standard American diet of ultra processed foods (they are literally in all boxed/packaged foods), we have systemic inflammation running rampant where it doesn't belong. 

Omega 6 also competes for the same receptor sites as omega 3 which we are typically deficient in on the standard American diet. Omega 3 boasts TONS of health benefits including improving heart health, depression, dementia, and arthritis. Our body prefers a 1:1 ratio of the two. However the standard American diet typically delivers a 20:1 or 30:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3. Not good!

I would therefore suggest, that an important part of a healthy diet is not only incorporating whole foods in place of processed foods, but also AVOIDING things like toxic ultra refined seed oils. 

So... take a look at the list in the blog post pic above and clean out your pantry! Then go ask a local butcher for their rendered tallow (beef fat) or lard (pig fat) to cook in. They might even give it to you for FREE since everyone else is too busy cooking in "vegetable oils!" 

Here is another helpful graphic to guide you:

*Note: Some people get confused as to why Coconut, Olive, Palm Kernel, and Avocado oils are okay thinking they are "vegetable" oils. Coconuts, Olives, and Avocados are in fact FRUIT, not seeds or vegetables and are easily cold pressed for oil. Palm Kernels are a unique type of seed and happen to be very high in stable (for cooking) saturated fat, similar to coconut oil.

Until next week!