Processed food has never been a majority in my diet. But recently I have set myself a goal to cut even that small amount into minimum. This includes some ingredients and food which I actually for a long time considered healthy until the latest years. Or at least the healthiest from all the options available. (But that of course doesn’t need to mean it makes it healthy, anyway.)
Salad dressing, margarine and mayonnaise. In generally basic vegetable oils. These I have been consuming in some amounts. And for doing this I have intentionally chosen these options over hard fats.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been taught that all the liquid vegetable oils are healthy, and the hard animal fats like lard and butter unhealthy. And that you can easily recognise healthy fat from unhealthy one just by its consistence and source (vegetable vs. animal). This was the truth to me for a long time.
But it’s not so simple. Naturally saturated, animal fats, are still, yes, considered unhealthy. They can f.ex. highly increase the risk of cardio vascular deceases. But problem is not fixed by replacing animal fats with vegetable oils. Not since the early 1900s when hydrogenation of vegetable oils started. In this chemical process liquid unsaturated fats like vegetable oils are turned into solid by adding hydrogen. Result fats, trans fats are highly toxic fats as they significantly increase the ‘bad’ cholesterol leading into cardio vascular deceases. Trans fats is used widely in today’s food production. One of the best known trans fat product is margarine, in which vegetable oils stay solid in room temperature. Therefore even it’s made of vegetable oils, it’s highly unhealthy product as the oils are largery or completely replaced by trans fats.
But as today’s consumer you are not on the safe side even if you dump all the solid fats from your diet. It’s more complicated. In market the most of the liquid vegetable oils as well are actually a health risk. This is because the these oils go through an intensive mechanical and chemical process to get as much oil out of the seeds as possible, as effectively as possible, and to make the properties of the oils as efficient for the producer as possible. The result is liquid oils with neutral colour and smell, comfortable cooking and baking properties, with expiration date far in the future.
This can sound good but this is not the whole truth. To produce these oils a variety of chemicals are used (f.ex. hexane which is a health hazard), oils are exposed to very high temperatures which actually oxidizes the oils. These rancid oils become a health risk. They contain free radicals which can trigger a number of deceases. Therefore these oils are not any better option than the solid trans fats. To cover the unpleasant rancid smell and look of the oxidized vegetable oils, they are top of all also bleached and deodorised.
So far to my knowledge, the only good fats we should use are unrefined, unsaturated and cold-pressed oils. F.ex. olive oil and avocado oil and many other cold pressed oils. You can also get these oils by eating olives, avocados, variety of seeds and nuts.
But even with these options you need to remember that it matters how you use them. F.ex. if you use cold pressed oils for frying in high temperatures, you destroy them with the heat turning them into trans fats, making them after all not any better options to the other options above. To get the health benefit out of these oils it’s bets to storage them properly and use them unheated, like in salad dressings, mayonnaise, smoothies and so on. And you get more health benefits absorbed into your system when you grind the seeds before consumption. One of the very good source of important healthy fats is also fish. By eating clean cold-water wild fish, or high quality supplements made of such fish, you get a lot of health benefits.
All this is important for the whole to keep your body and mind function at their highest potential.
I have started to make salad dressings by myself. I use only cold-pressed oils, fresh clean herbs, fruits and vegetables. Options are endless! This one which I have made already few times, is so unbelievably tasty that it’s easy to say goodbye to the highly processed ones.
